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PRESIDENT WILSON 

and the 

MORAL AIMS of the WAR 



PRESIDENT WILSON 

and the 

MORAL AIMS of the WAR 

BY 

Rev. FREDERICK LYNCH, D.D. 

AUTHOR OF 

" The New Opportunities of the Ministry" " What Makes 

a Nation Great," "The Challenge," etc. 



WITH ADDITIONAL CHAPTERS 
BY 

Rev. John Clifford, D.D., LL.D., of London 

Rev. Arthur J. Brown, D.D., LL.D. 

William I. Hull, Ph.D. 

Rev. Henry Churchill King, D.D., LL.D. 

Rev. William Pierson Merrill, D.D. 




New York Chicago 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



Copyright, 19 '8, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 






JUL -5 I9I& V: 



New York : 158 Htth Avenue 
Chicago : 1 7 North Wabash Ave. 



©G..;.499536 



CONTENTS 



I. The Moral Aims of the War ... 9 

Frederick Lynch, D.D. 

II. President Wilson's Ideal for America . 15 

Frederick Lynch, D.D. 

III. The Christian Measure of Greatness . 22 

Frederick Lynch, D.D. 

IV. The World After the War . . . .30 

Frederick Lynch, D.D. 

V. Labour and the Coming Peace . . .37 
Frederick Lynch, D.D. 

VI. A League of Nations 43 

John Clijford, D.D. 

VII. The Moral Conflict 50 

Arthur J. Brown, D.D. 

VIII. The President's International Ideal . 59 
William I. Hull, Ph.D. 

IX. Grounds of Hope in the Present Crisis 67 
Henry Churchill King, D.D. 

X. The Church and the League of Nations 82 
William Pier son Merrill, D.D. 

Appendices 91 



PREFACE 



IN November, 191 7, the National Committee on 
the Churches and the Moral Aims of the War 
was organized for the purpose of keeping before 
the people of the United States the lofty and disin- 
terested character of the aims of the great struggle, 
so far as our nation was concerned, and especially 
to create an overwhelming resolution in the hearts 
of our people to insist that out of this war must 
come some new international order that shall make 
such wars as this in which the world is engaged im- 
probable, if not impossible, forever. It was decided 
that conferences with groups of clergymen and 
other Christian workers should be held throughout 
the country, and that the various programmes of 
this new world order, now everywhere engaging the 
minds of statesmen and scholars, with chief empha- 
sis upon a League of Nations, should be laid before 
these groups. Especially was it agreed upon that the 
aims of this war as expressed in the messages and 
addresses of the President of the United States 
should be laid before the people, for they mark a 
new departure in the history of the world. They 

7 



8 PREFACE 

are not only moral in their character — they are 
Christian. 

This little book contains editorials written and 
addresses delivered by myself and others in con- 
nection with these meetings, with an appendix 
containing valuable lists of utterances by President 
Wilson and others on a League of Nations and the 
moral aims of the war. I think the extracts from 
President Wilson's addresses and messages cover 
nearly all he has said on these particular subjects. 
When brought together as here they reveal a new 
epoch in history. It is the first time the head of a 
great nation has ever said such things. The Presi- 
dent of the United States is demanding of the 
nations the same standard of conduct as that which 
prevails among all Christian gentlemen. 

These various chapters are brought together here 
especially for the sake of the many clergymen and 
other Christian workers who are becoming inter- 
ested in establishing the new world order. It seemed 
better to print the editorials as originally written 
and this accounts for some repetition. 

New York. F. L. 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 

WE have just been re-reading the various ad- 
dresses of the President of the United 
States delivered to Congress and to other 
audiences since the entrance of the United States 
into the war. Again we have been impressed with 
the remarkable fact that in every utterance the 
moral aims of the war are those which receive 
chief and almost only emphasis. It is a new thing 
in history, with one exception, England's dec- 
laration of war to uphold the rights of Belgium. 
There have been innumerable declarations of war 
and statements of war aims by rulers which dwell 
upon the vindication of national honour, the preser- 
vation of the rights of the nation entering upon the 
war, the protection of property, the preservation of 
the lives of citizens, and national defence, but no 
others which put the service of humanity first, regard- 
less of the gain to the nation itself. To quote from 
President Wilson's address of November 5, 1916: 
"Why, my fellow citizens, it is an unprecedented 
thing in the world that any nation in determining 
its foreign relations should be unselfish, and my 
ambition is to see America set the great example." 

9 



10 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

The United States lost millions of dollars worth 
of property and hundreds of lives through the ruth- 
less acts of submarines. As the war progressed the 
country faced endless complications in the future, 
should Germany triumph. Evil machinations were 
going on inside our nation itself, and the nation 
was being used as a tool against the Allies. It would 
have been perfectly natural for the United States 
to have gone to war because of all these attacks 
and of the innumerable violations of her honour. 
But when at last the President declared war it 
was not these things he emphasized, and he was 
meticulously careful to say it was not for gain of 
territory or for revenge. In every utterance it 
was moral, ethical, religious aims that were em- 
phasized. This marks a new era in history. It 
was one of the great steps forward in civilization, 
when civilization seemed tottering to the ground. 

Five aims are mentioned again and again in these 
addresses. It is well that we should dwell upon 
these five aims, for they are all moral, religious 
aims. 

i. In almost every address Mr. Wilson says we 
have entered upon this war to secure democracy for 
the whole world. "The world must be made safe 
for democracy." But democracy is a religious thing. 
It came straight from Jesus Christ. It is born out 
of the sense of the worth of every human soul as 
a child of God. It is a corollary of that truth for- 
ever on the lips of Jesus, the Fatherhood of God. 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 11 

Christianity began as a democracy of equal souls 
in the kingdom of God. And in democracy lies the 
peace of the world. It is not — it never has been — 
democracies that originate wars of aggrandizement 
or of dominion. Mr. Wilson has seen this: "Great 
democracies are not belligerent. They do not seek 
or desire war. Their thought is of individual lib- 
erty and of the free labour that supports life and the 
uncensored thought that quickens it." World de- 
mocracy means world peace, thinks the President, 
and therefore he puts it as one of the chief aims of 
this war. But again, democracy is a moral aim. 
And the desire to win it for the whole world is an 
act of service, which is a Christian act. 

2. We have entered upon this war, says the Pres- 
ident, to secure "the right of those who submit to 
authority to have a voice in their own government." 
Here again we have a moral aim. We are fighting 
not for territory, not for revenge, but to insure for 
other peoples than ourselves the right to say what 
course their nation shall pursue in the common life 
of the world. The President assumes, and, we be- 
lieve rightly, that were it left to the people of any 
nation to determine the nation's policy, they would 
not vote for aggrandizement, for expansion at the 
cost of war, or for the despoliation of other peoples. 

3. "We shall fight . . . for the rights and lib- 
erties of small nations," says Mr. Wilson in his 
address of April 2, 191 7. And he has said it many 
times. Here again the United States has set before 



12 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

it a moral aim. We are to make untold sacrifices 
not for ourselves but for the right of the small and 
weak nations of the earth to live their own lives 
without fear of dictation, domination or invasion. 
They must no longer be mere pawns to be moved 
about the map as suits the purposes of great and 
ambitious powers. Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, 
they are peace-loving nations, and they have the 
right to pursue their own happy lives without fear 
or interference. "America seeks no material profit 
or aggrandizement of any kind. She is fighting for 
no advantage or selfish objects of her own, but for 
the liberation of peoples everywhere from the ag- 
gressions of autocratic force." 

4. In almost every address which Mr. Wilson 
has made during the last year he has put as the 
great objective of the war a league of nations 
pledged to settle its own disputes by peaceful 
methods and committed, through its united power, 
to preserve the peace of the world. "We shall fight 
. . . for a universal dominion of right by such 
a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and 
safety to all nations and make the world itself at 
last free." (The many utterances of the President 
to this effect have been collated in Appendix III.) 
This is simply brotherhood, co-operation, good-will, 
mutual service, the common life, applied to nations 
as Christianity has applied them to individuals from 
the beginning. It is putting the kingdom of right- 
eousness above the selfishness of nationalism. It 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 13 

is the realizing of "each for all, and all for each" in 
the realm of nations as we have long since realized 
it among men within the nation. It is establishing 
a democracy of nations similar to the democracy of 
men. It is a great, sublime, moral aim. 

5. Finally the President has declared that we 
have entered upon this war to secure a Christian 
standard of conduct between nations similar to that 
which obtains among good men. It has not been 
so in the past. We have had a double standard of 
ethics, Christian for individuals, pagan for nations. 
We have said it was wrong for men to steal from 
each other, but permissible for nations; wrong for 
men to kill each other, but permissible for the 
mighty nation to destroy the weaker nation ; wrong 
for men to settle their disputes by guns and swords, 
right for nations; wrong for men to seek revenge, 
the natural thing for nations. We have condemned 
the man who lives for self alone, for his rights 
alone, and we have called that man a knave who 
would seek his rights at the cost of the community's 
suffering, but we have expected nations to live for 
self and to plunge the whole world into misery to 
vindicate their own rights or honour. We have called 
the man who served most the great man; we have 
called the nation which could get the most, by any 
means, the great nation. All this must be changed, 
says the President. The nations must observe the 
same Christian rule of conduct that men observe in 
their relations with each other. In other words, 



14 THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 

we find the President applying the gospel to nations. 
When was there ever before a ruler who used such 
words as these: "We are at the beginning of an age 
in which it will be insisted that the same standards 
of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done 
shall be observed among nations and their govern- 
ments that are observed among the individual citi- 
zens of civilized states." "It is clear that nations 
must in the future be governed by the same high 
code of honour that we demand of individuals." 



II 



PRESIDENT WILSON'S IDEAL FOR 
AMERICA 

IN Appendix VI we have brought together thirty- 
four utterances of President Wilson, chosen 
from almost as many addresses, on the ideals 
he cherishes for America. We believe that we run 
no risk of contradiction when we say that in no 
collection of utterances on national ideals by any 
ruler of past or present times could any such selec- 
tion as this be made. As Mr. Wilson himself has 
said in one of his addresses: "It is an unprecedented 
thing in the world that any nation in determining 
its foreign relations should be unselfish, and my am- 
bition is to see America set the great example." 
But in every utterance of Mr. Wilson the ideals for 
America are as unselfish as those that the finest 
Christian gentleman would set for himself. The 
American people seem to be just realizing to how 
high a pitch the President is raising these national 
ideals. Some are even beginning to get frightened, 
for there are many individuals who are not as un- 
selfish as Mr. Wilson wishes to have the nation 
become. He is demanding that the nation act in a 

15 



16 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

Christian way, become a Christian nation — not in 
the sense that everybody in it will be Christian, 
but that it conform as a government to the stand- 
ards of a Christian gentleman. 

It is interesting to note the effect that these ideals 
are having abroad. At first England was a little 
sceptical of them. Now her statesmen and prophets 
are using Mr. Wilson's words, and her labour parties 
are introducing them into their constitutions. Ger- 
many naturally looks upon them as either hypocrit- 
ical or the vagaries of a visionary and dreamer. 
No echo of any such sentiments as ideals for nations 
has yet come from any of her statesmen. It would 
mean the end of this war — and perhaps of all 
war — should the German government be willing 
sincerely to propound these sentiments as the 
national ideals. But it is a great thing that the ruler 
of one nation propounds them in his every utter- 
ance. It is not too much to hope that the preachers 
in the churches may follow him, and help to make 
these really Christian ideals the ideals of the United 
States. If one will closely study the thirty-four 
extracts he will find they may be grouped somewhat 
as follows: 

i. "America exists not to serve itself, but to serve 
mankind." The philosophy of nations has always 
been that the one aim and purpose of the nation 
was to serve itself, and generally to serve itself at 
the expense of other weaker nations. No wonder 
that the German papers said, when Mr. Wilson ut- 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 17 

tered just these words in his address of September 
28, 1915, that the President was pharisaical. He 
said: "There have been other nations as rich as we; 
there have been other nations as powerful; there 
have been other nations as spirited ; but I hope we 
shall never forget that we created this nation, not 
to serve ourselves, but to serve mankind." Nobody 
could believe that a ruler of a great nation held 
such ideals for his country. It would be the end 
of a nation's existence, said the Germans, should it 
hold such views. But Mr. Wilson insists that this 
shall be the ideal for America, and he has uttered 
it again and again. 

"Come, let us renew our allegiance to America, 
conserve her strength in its purity, make her chief 
among those who serve mankind" ; "We did not set 
this government up in order that we might have a 
selfish and separate liberty, for we are now ready to 
come to your assistance and fight upon the field of 
the world the cause of human liberty"; "She is 
fighting for no advantage or selfish object of her 
own, but for the liberation of people everywhere 
from the aggressions of autocratic force" ; "For we 
are part of the world, and nothing that concerns the 
whole world can be indifferent to us. We want 
always to hold the force of America to fight for 
what? Not merely for the rights of property or of 
national ambition, but for the rights of mankind." 
And thus one may go on through the addresses. 
Just as the ideal of the Christian gentleman is ser- 



18 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

vice to the weak and needy, so the ideal of the 
Christian nation should be service to the other na- 
tions of the world. And just as the Christian does 
not count the cost of his service, but is ready to 
make all sacrifices when the need calls him, so, says 
Mr. Wilson, the modern Christian nation will count 
no cost, will make any sacrifice, as America now is 
doing, when the opportunity to serve the world ar- 
rives. Nations have not gone to war before to serve 
the world. Let us be glad that when America did 
enter upon her sacrifice it was in service of others, 
not of herself. 

2. The ideal for America which finds commonest 
expression in the President's addresses is this, that 
America shall never desire anything for herself that 
she does not desire for all mankind. This lofty 
sentiment is as new for nations as Christianity was 
new for individuals two thousand years ago. We 
know not where to find it among utterances of rul- 
ers and governments outside of the addresses of the 
President of the United States. Its adoption by 
all other nations would end war between nations 
forever. It is the ideal of the Christian community 
for the community of nations. Its universal adop- 
tion will mark the beginning of a commonwealth 
of nations which shall be as a new order established 
in the earth. Yet, so far as Mr. Wilson can claim 
the right to speak for America, it is the American 
ideal. It shines out in almost every address he has 
made during the last two years. Sometimes we can 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 19 

hardly believe our own eyes when we read on page 
after page of a ruler's addresses such words as 
these: "The interesting and inspiring thing about 
America, gentlemen, is that she asks nothing for 
herself except what she has a right to ask for hu- 
manity itself"; "In the day to come men will no 
longer wonder how America is going to work out 
her destiny, for she will have proclaimed to them 
that her destiny is not divided from the destiny of 
the world, that her purpose is justice and love of 
mankind" ; "No other nation was ever born into the 
world with the purpose of serving the rest of the 
world just as much as it served itself" ; "And Amer- 
ica will have forgotten her traditions whenever on 
any occasion she fights for herself under such cir- 
cumstances as will show that she has forgotten to 
fight for all mankind"; "The position of America 
in this war is so clearly avowed that no man can be 
excused for mistaking it. She seeks no material 
profit or aggrandizement of any kind. She is fight- 
ing for no advantage or selfish object of her own, 
but for the liberation of peoples everywhere from 
the aggression of autocratic force" ; "My dream is 
that as the years go on . . . America will come 
into the full light of the day when all shall know 
that she puts human rights above all other rights, 
and that her flag is the flag not only of America 
but of humanity." 

This is all Christian and we are a long way to- 
ward a stable and civilized world when even one 



20 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

nation can make this her ideal, that she desires noth- 
ing for herself that she does not desire for all hu- 
manity. 

3. The other ideal for America which runs 
through the President's addresses like a thread of 
fine gold is that she shall, herself, as a nation, act 
always only as a Christian gentleman would act, 
and thus convince the world by her example that the 
time has come when nations must conform to the 
same standard of conduct as that which obtains 
between gentlemen within the nation. Nations have 
souls as well as individuals and there is only one 
standard of right and wrong for souls. Respect- 
able nations must not in the future do anything 
respectable men do not do. The same civilization, 
the same code of honour, the same Christian attitude 
must obtain among nations in the world as obtains 
among gentlemen in the community. This is strange 
gospel to some nations. There are individuals in 
every nation, even our own, who deny it. But it is 
the ideal the President of the United States is hold- 
ing up to the world through the clash and din of 
this great war. They should be committed to mem- 
ory by every American: "It is clear that nations 
must in the future be governed by the same high 
code of honour that we demand of individuals"; 
"When I have made a promise to a man I try to 
keep it, and I know of no other rule permissible to 
a nation. The most distinguished nation in the 
world is the nation that can and will keep its prom- 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 21 

ises, even to its own hurt"; "What I intend to 
preach from this time on is that America must show 
that as a member of the family of nations she has 
the same attitude toward the other nations that she 
wishes her people to have toward each other" ; "We 
are at the beginning of an age in which it will be 
insisted that the same standards of conduct and of 
responsibility for wrong done shall be observed 
among nations and their governments that are ob- 
served among the individual citizens of civilized 
states." 

There must henceforth be but one ethic, one mo- 
rality, the same for men and nations, says our Pres- 
ident, and insists that America be the prophet of 
this new gospel. 



Ill 



THE CHRISTIAN MEASURE OF 
GREATNESS 

WE use the words Christian measure of great- 
ness deliberately, for the ideal of greatness 
held by the world is quite antipodal to that 
given by Christ. Christ was very conscious of this 
and put his own ideal over against it most emphat- 
ically — 'The world says this, but I say . . ." runs 
all through his words either in direct utterance or 
by implication. But the line is as sharply drawn 
after two thousand years as it was in Christ's mind. 
One has only to talk ten minutes with the first man 
he meets, or read the first paper, magazine or book 
he chances upon, or see a play, to realize how far 
the world's idea of greatness is from Christ's. 

Thus the great man from the world's point of 
view is the man who can get the most. Christ's 
ideal of the great man is he who gives the most. 
Christ never sought anything for Himself. His life 
was one of self-giving. His meat and drink was 
to do the will of God, and that will was the giving 
of all He had, even His life, to the world. 

The great man from the world's point of view is 
22 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 23 

he who can make others serve him, who can free 
himself from the necessity of inconvenience and sac- 
rifice, who can make everything minister to his 
pleasure. Christ's ideal of the great man was he 
who, forgetting himself, passed his life in minis- 
tering, even at the cost of inconvenience, pain and 
sacrifice, to the needs of the world. "Ye know 
that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and 
their great ones exercise authority over them. Not 
so shall it be among you ; but whosoever would be- 
come great among you shall be your minister; and 
whosoever would be first among you shall be your 
servant; even as the Son of man came not to be 
ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His 
life a ransom for many." 

The world's ideal of greatness is power. Power 
is worshiped by the world. Ask the world who 
are the great men and it answers Alexander, Caesar, 
Napoleon, Bismarck. In Germany the great men 
are the war lords. In America the great men, from 
the world's point of view, have been our steel 
kings, our coal barons, our railroad magnates, our 
famous brokers and financiers, our successful 
politicians. He is great who has power. Christ 
never seems to have given any thought to power. 
Love was to him the distinguishing mark of great- 
ness. The gentle, meek, merciful, ministering man 
was His great man. "By this shall all men know 
that ye are my disciples (that is, share his great- 
ness), that ye have love one toward another." And 



24 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

Paul, who knew the mind of Christ, puts love as the 
final test of greatness. Likewise John, who leaned 
upon Christ's breast, when he comes to write upon 
Christian greatness has only one word, love, not 
power. 

Another outstanding trait of greatness in Christ's 
mind was the possession of a great measure of the 
life of God in the soul. He was greatest who had 
most of God in him. He closes His last great 
prayer with the ardent supplication that his dis- 
ciples may remain "in us," in the Father and Him- 
self. So they shall be great and bear much fruit 
by abiding in Him and the Father. Humanity 
becomes great when infused with divinity. Men 
are great when they are sons of God. Human 
weakness becomes transfigured into divine great- 
ness when God permeates it. Creatures of time 
become eternal, the mortal puts on immortality here 
and now, when God is in possession. The great 
man, no matter what his station, condition, rank, 
position, is he who is filled with God. This was 
what made Christ great, this, with the love and 
compassion which always flow out of this great- 
ness — that he was God-filled. 

We cannot leave this subject without expressing 
our extreme joy that at last the Christian Church 
is beginning to demand that nations submit to the 
same test of greatness it applies to men. In Eng- 
land, France and America the leaders of the 
churches are everywhere beginning to say that the 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 25 

things which make a man great are those which 
make a nation great. It is one of the fine fruits of 
the war. The great nation of the future will be the 
nation which lives to give instead of living only 
to get; which lives to serve humanity and the 
weaker nations of the world instead of living purely 
for its own rights and privileges ; which speaks for 
the world in terms of good will, instead of in terms 
of power; which wants nothing for itself it does 
not want for other peoples. Great Britain is in- 
finitely greater giving of her life for Belgium than 
in giving it to acquire South Africa. The United 
States is infinitely greater going to war for the sav- 
ing of civilization and the right to live, for all the 
world, than it would have been in going to war to 
secure the safety of property or the lives of its own 
people. When a nation which has nothing to gain 
for itself makes a great sacrifice, laying down its 
life for the sins of other nations and to save the 
nations sinned against, it is measuring up to the 
gospel standard of greatness. 

Nowhere have these gospel ideals of greatness 
been applied to nations more strikingly than in the 
various utterances of the President of the United 
States, made since the outbreak of the European 
war. Let us rejoice that in these things our nation 
leads. It will be well to bring some of these appli- 
cations of gospel greatness to nations to our atten- 
tion once more: 

"We are at the beginning of an age in which it 



26 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

will be insisted that the same standards of conduct 
and of responsibility for wrong done shall be ob- 
served among nations and their government that 
are observed among the individual citizens of civi- 
lized states." 

"Only free peoples can hold their purpose and 
their honour steady to a common end and prefer 
the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of 
their own." 

(We quote the above sentence because of the 
striking implication that the great nation, the nation 
of the future, will prefer the interests of mankind 
to any interest of its own. This is straight gospel 
greatness. ) 

"When I have made a promise as a man I try to 
keep it, and I know no other rule permissible to a 
nation. The most distinguished nation in the world 
is the nation that can and will keep its promises, 
even to its own hurt." 

"The only excuse that America can ever have for 
the assertion of her physical force is that she asserts 
it in behalf of the interests of humanity." 

"It means that you have not only got to be just 
to your fellowmen, but that as a nation you have 
got to be just to other nations. It comes high. It 
is not an easy thing to do. It is easy to think first 
of the material interest of America, but it is not 
easy to think first of what America, if she loves 
justice, ought to do in the field of international 
affairs. I believe that at whatever cost America 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 27 

should be just to other peoples and treat other peo- 
ples as she demands that they should treat her. She 
has a right to demand that they treat her with jus- 
tice and respect, and she has a right to insist that 
they treat her in that fashion, but she can not with 
dignity or self-respect insist upon that unless she is 
willing to act in the same fashion toward them. 
That I am ready to fight for at any cost to myself ." 

"Here is the nation God has builded by our hands. 
What shall we do with it? Who is there who does 
not stand ready at all times to act in her behalf in a 
spirit of devoted and disinterested patriotism? We 
are yet only in the youth and first consciousness of 
our power. The day of our country's life is still 
but in its fresh morning. Let us lift our eyes to 
the great tracts of life yet to be conquered in the 
interests of righteous peace. Come, let us renew 
our allegiance to America, conserve her strength in 
its purity, make her chief among those who serve 
mankind, self-reverenced, self-commanded, mistress 
of all forces of quiet counsel, strong above all 
others in good will and the might of invincible jus- 
tice and right." 

"The mission of America in the world is essen- 
tially a mission of peace and good will among men. 
She has become the home and asylum of men of all 
creeds and races. Within her hospitable borders 
they have found homes and congenial associations 
and freedom and a wide and cordial welcome, and 
they have become part of the bone and sinew and 



28 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

spirit of America itself. America has been made up 
out of the nations of the world and is the friend of 
the nations of the world." 

"We shall, I confidently believe, never again take 
another foot of territory by conquest. We shall 
never in any circumstances seek to make an inde- 
pendent people subject to our dominion; because we 
believe, we passionately believe, in the right of every 
people to choose their own allegiance and be free 
of masters altogether. For ourselves we wish noth- 
ing but the full liberty of self-government ; and with 
ourselves in this great matter we associate all the 
peoples of our own hemisphere. We wish not only 
for the United States, but for them the fullest free- 
dom of independent growth and of action, for we 
know that throughout this hemisphere the same 
aspirations are everywhere being worked out, under 
diverse conditions but with the same impulse and 
ultimate object." 

"We are participants, whether we would or not, 
in the life of the world. The interests of all nations 
are our own also. We are partners with the rest. 
What affects mankind is inevitably our affair as 
well as the affair of the nations of Europe and 
Asia." 

Speaking of the Western Hemisphere, the Pres- 
ident said: 

"I think that thoughtful men in all the democra- 
cies of the hemisphere are beginning to see the real 
purpose and character of the United States. She 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 29 

is offering in every proposal that she makes to give 
the most sacred pledges on her own part that she 
will in no case be the aggressor against either the 
political independence or the territorial integrity of 
any other state or nation, at the same time that she 
is proposing and insisting upon similar pledges from 
all the nations of the world who have its peace at 
heart and are willing to associate themselves for the 
maintenance of that peace." 

In every one of the quotations given above the 
President of the United States makes the standard 
of greatness for the nations the same standard the 
gospels give for men. 



IV 
THE WORLD AFTER THE WAR 

THERE must be a new world after this war. 
Indeed, the old order has already largely 
gone. A Sunday school teacher had her class 
about her one hot August Sunday when a terrific 
tempest came. The thunder boomed, the lightning 
flashed and crashed. She asked the boys if any of 
them knew why the lightning never struck twice in 
the same place. One of the boys answered : "When 
the lightning strikes a place, the same place ain't 
there any more. ,, The lightning has struck the 
world, and the same world is not here any more. 
People will never be satisfied to go back to the old 
order. It has failed and they know it. 

What the new world order will be no one can 
foresee in detail; but the world will demand that 
it be something radical, wonderful, based on new 
principles of conduct, on some new relationship of 
nations. It must be something commensurate with 
the awful price zve are paying for it. Nothing less 
than an absolutely new international order and one 
that can insure the world against such calamity ever 

30 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 31 

again coming, something that will bring to interna- 
tional relationships that good will and security that 
now obtains among individuals is in any way worth 
the price we are paying. 

We will pay fifteen or twenty million human lives 
lost, five million of them killed, before we are 
through, and these five million our youngest and our 
best. We are paying the incalculable sorrows of 
millions of mothers, wives, and orphaned children. 
We are paying the sufferings and starvation of mil- 
lions of women and children. We are paying a sum 
of money beyond the comprehension of the human 
mind, a sum which will demand large parts of every- 
thing every man shall earn for centuries. We are 
paying in devastated lands, ruined homes and cities. 
We are paying the social progress of a hundred 
years, not only losing reforms we had gained but 
mortgaging the future. We are paying in enmities, 
hatreds and revenges that will last for generations. 
All these things, and infinitely more, we are paying. 
Surely the result must be something big, wonderful, 
audacious even, for such price. We are paying hell 
— we ought at last to get something approximating 
heaven, one would think. 

What we shall get and whether we shall get it or 
not will depend largely upon the leadership of the 
Christian people of the world. Now two great 
things, one political, one spiritual, are everywhere 
beginning to take possession of the minds of Chris- 
tian statesmen, thinkers and prophets, as the war 



32 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

goes on, as the necessary result of the years of strife 
and sacrifice. Simultaneously, in many lands these 
aims of the war are finding expression. More and 
more as the war goes on are the ablest minds calling 
for them as the only satisfactory rewards of the 
awful cost, and as the only guarantees of perma- 
nent peace. We refer first to some form of a League 
of Nations pledged to settle disputes by judicial and 
Christian methods, and secondly, to the extension 
of the Christian ethic to the relationships of nations, 
as it has been practised among individuals for a 
hundred years. 

It is a most noteworthy fact, that, quite inde- 
pendent of each other, several of the most prom- 
inent English statesmen, Lord Bryce, Viscount 
Grey, Mr. Asquith, Lord Robert Cecil, G. Lowes 
Dickinson, W. H. Dickinson, M.P., and several of 
our most prominent American statesmen and think- 
ers, Mr. Taft, President Lowell, Ambassadors 
Straus and Marburg, Hamilton Holt, led by Pres- 
ident Wilson, have everywhere been saying that un- 
less some "concert of nations," "league of nations," 
"partnership of nations," composed of the great 
powers, and all others that may come in, shall be 
achieved, this war has been fought in vain. 

It has been in every message and address of the 
President of the United States since the famous 
address to the Senate on January 22, 19 17. In that 
address he says that this war must end in a "concert 
of nations." Perhaps nowhere has the desire been 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 33 

more forcibly expressed than in his famous Des 
Moines address: 

"I pray God that if this contest have no other 
result, it will at least have the result of creating 
. . . some sort of joint guarantee of peace on the 
part of the great nations of the world." 

Mr. Asquith in his recent widely quoted address 
at Manchester put this as the chief aim of the war. 
He said that he saw no hope for any future civiliza- 
tion that was not based on "a partnership of na- 
tions" pledged to the peaceful settlement of inter- 
national disputes, and engaged in co-operative work 
for the welfare of the world instead of in the selfish 
advancing of national interests, and also there must 
come with this some beginning at universal disar- 
mament. 

We cannot go into the details of these various 
proposals here, although they are very simple, 
namely, to extend those principles of political or- 
ganization and conduct that already prevail within 
every civilized nation. But we would earnestly 
urge upon every clergyman and upon all other 
Christian leaders that they be instructing the people 
in the aims of this war as expressed by our Pres- 
ident, so that when our delegates go to the peace 
conference they may be prepared to demand, with 
the voice of the nation behind them, that new polit- 
ical order for which the President went to war, 
and which, as it looks now, England and France 
will demand. Many books dealing with this new 



34 PRESIDENT : WILSON; AND 

order, and with some form of a league of nations 
have been published recently and should have the 
careful study of every intelligent man. Above all, 
we wish every one would secure a copy of the book 
just published, called " Why We Are at War," con- 
taining the messages of the President of the United 
States, and would go through it with pencil, mark- 
ing the passages that state "the aims of this war." 
And, more and more, the allied nations are accept- 
ing our President as their spokesman. 

The other conviction that is everywhere emerging 
and finding expression in the utterances of Chris- 
tian leaders in both Europe and America is that 
there can be no world safe for democracy, civiliza- 
tion, or religion itself, so long as the present double 
standard of ethics, Christian for people, pagan for 
nations, prevails. The conviction is seizing the 
prophetic men everywhere that this war must put 
an end to that sort of thing for ever, and that 
nations must be brought under the ethics of Jesus 
Christ as individuals have been brought, that nations 
must be held accountable to the same laws of God 
and man that govern the relationships of all decent 
men. It has not been so. We have had two stand- 
ards of right and wrong, one for men, another for 
nations. It has been wrong, even a crime, for man 
to steal from man; we have condoned, yes, even 
praised stealing by nations. It has been wrong, even 
a crime, for man to kill his brother man, except in 
self-defence, but we have not raised our voice, until 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 35 

very recently, when a big nation went out ruthlessly 
to destroy a weaker nation. We put the man in 
prison who attempts to act as his own judge and 
juror, and to inflict punishment with his own hands, 
but we have expected nothing but that on the part 
of nations. All Christian gentlemen long ago aban- 
doned the settlement of disputes by brute force, 
fists, guns, knives, and have learned to settle them 
peaceably, under the law of Christ; but the first 
thought, when two nations have a quarrel, is to 
rush to arms. We have long ago learned to call 
that man great who gives most to the world, who 
serves his fellowmen; we call that nation greatest 
which can get the most by any means. The Chris- 
tian man does not live by a doctrine of rights alone. 
He is thinking of his duty and opportunity before 
the weak ones of the world. He would never insist 
upon getting his rights when the process involved the 
innocent. But nations have lived for rights alone 
until recently, and have known no duties to any 
but themselves. 

All this must be changed now, and nations must 
live by those same principles of action, laws of con- 
duct, common relationships that prevail universally 
among good men, and are enforced against evil 
men. We have brought the realm of human rela- 
tionships up into the kingdom of God ; now we must 
bring up the nations until all the kingdoms of this 
world are become the kingdom of our Lord and of 
His Christ. We must insist that as a result of 



36 THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 

this war there be but one standard of ethics in the 
kingdom of God. There is no other security for 
religion or even for life itself. 

We would say in encouragement of those who 
read, that during the last two years the sermons 
of both England and America, those published in 
journals and in books, are everywhere saying this 
thing. It runs through the best books of the last 
two years. 



LABOUR AND THE COMING PEACE 

FEW conferences of recent years have been 
followed with more interest than that of the 
American Federation of Labour held in Buf- 
falo. The President of the United States was 
there and made an address which may be taken as 
the official utterance of the Government as to its 
attitude toward the great world conflict. Every 
problem affecting labor was discussed, and on the 
whole wisely, and always with the world after this 
war in mind. But by far the most significant con- 
tribution of all was the remarkable "Basis for Peace 
Negotiations" adopted by the Conference. It is one 
of the most statesmanlike pronouncements that has 
been issued in America since we went into the war. 
If it truly represents the mind of the masses it 
augurs well for the future and casts upon these 
troubled times a great ray of encouragement. We 
hope it will be read and pondered by every man in 
America — and in Europe, for that matter. It is as 
follows: 

37 



38 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

BASIS FOR PEACE NEGOTIATIONS 

"We urge the adoption of the following declarations as 
the basis upon which peace must be negotiated. 

"(i) The combination of the free peoples of the world 
in a common covenant for genuine and practical co-opera- 
tion to secure justice and, therefore, peace, in relations be- 
tween nations. 

"(2) Governments derive their just power from the con- 
sent of the governed. 

"(3) No political or economic restrictions meant to benefit 
some nations and to cripple or embarrass others. 

"(4) No indemnities or reprisals based upon vindictive 
purposes or deliberate desire to injure, but to right mani- 
fest wrongs. 

"(5) Recognition of the rights of small nations and of 
the principle, 'No people must be forced under sovereignty 
under which it does not wish to live.' 

"(6) No territorial changes or adjustments of power 
except in furtherance of the welfare of the peoples affected 
and in furtherance of world peace. 

"In addition to these basic principles, which are based 
upon declarations of our President of these United States, 
there should be incorporated in the treaty that shall con- 
stitute the guide of nations in the new period and condi- 
tions into which we enter at the close of the war, the fol- 
lowing declarations, fundamental to the best interests of all 
nations and of vital importance to wage-earners: 

"(1) No article or commodity shall be shipped or deliv- 
ered in international commerce in the production of which 
children under the age of sixteen have been employed or 
permitted to work. 

"(2) It shall be declared that the basic work-day in in- 
dustry and commerce shall not exceed eight hours. 

"(3) Involuntary servitude shall not exist except as a 
punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been 
duly convicted. 

"(4) Establishment of trial by jury." 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 39 

We wish to comment on three or four of these 
most momentous resolutions. 

Number one calls for "the free combination of 
the world in a common covenant for genuine and 
practical co-operation to secure justice and, there- 
fore, peace, in relations between nations.'* The 
exact words, "League of Nations" or "League of 
Peace," are not used here, but this is manifestly 
what the workingmen had in mind. Labour in the 
United States has put itself alongside the President 
of the United States and the leading statesmen of 
England, France and America in demanding that 
this war shall issue in some league of the great 
powers that shall have as its fundamental article the 
settlement of international disputes by judicial proc- 
esses, and shall lift the relationships of nations up on 
to that high level where they shall correspond to those 
now pertaining to individuals. In England, inspired 
by the utterances of such men as Lord Bryce, Vis- 
count Grey, Lord Balfour, Mr. Asquith and Mr. 
Dickinson, and by eminent leaders in all branches 
of the church, a "League of Nations Society" has 
been formed, which is advocating this idea with 
great response. In the United States such men as 
ex-President Taft, President Lowell, Ambassador 
Marburg, Hon. Oscar S. Straus and Dr. Hamilton 
Holt have created the "League to Enforce Peace," 
which has met with wide response, and attracted 
to itself hundreds of the leading minds of the 
nation. President Wilson has again and again 



40 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

maintained in his messages and speeches that some 
form of a league of nations must issue out of this 
unparalleled conflict. In fact, most thinking people 
are beginning to feel, as Mr. Asquith put it a while 
ago, that there is no hope for the future of civiliza- 
tion except in some "partnership of nations." Are 
we not all of us beginning to feel that only some 
such partnership or league of nations is the suffi- 
cient result of the terrible cost and sacrifice the 
world is paying? If we go back to the old inter- 
national order all this unconfutable price will have 
been paid in vain, all this sacrifice of pain and life 
have been of no avail. This new political order is 
the only adequate reward of the unspeakable agony. 
We are glad that labour has put itself upon record to 
this effect. 

Number three declares that there should be "no 
political or economic restrictions meant to benefit 
some nations and to cripple or embarrass others." 
Here again the words are general, but it is at once 
patent that they are called forth by the Paris con- 
ference of the Allies, where the question of continu- 
ing the war against Germany by economic measures 
after the military victory against her should be won, 
was discussed. The best minds in every nation have 
revolted against this. The revolt was manifested 
not only in America — we were not in the war at 
that time — but in England, France and Japan. It 
would be not only an unchristian act, but it would 
make any future peace of the world impossible. 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 41 

It would sow the most prolific seeds of future wars, 
it would defeat the very ends for which all the 
nations are fighting, and it would make any league 
of nations for permanent peace impossible. It is 
well to recall the words of our own President here: 
"Punitive damages, the dismemberment of empires, 
the establishment of selfish and exclusive economic 
leagues we deem inexpedient and in the end worse 
than futile ; no proper basis for a peace of any kind, 
least of all for an enduring peace.' ' We are glad 
the workingmen have spoken so emphatically upon 
this point. They will carry the world with them. 

Number four reads: "No indemnities or reprisals 
based upon vindictive purposes or deliberate desire 
to injure, but to right manifest wrongs." Thij 
sounds very much like the Sermon on the Mount and 
we are glad it comes from labour. It comes, too, at 
an opportune time, for many voices are urging the 
contrary. But, if, with the labour group, the world 
can rise above revenge at the close of this war, it 
will be one of the steps surest to guarantee per- 
manent peace, and to win the heart of the German 
people to that friendship our President insistently 
says he hopes may sometime obtain again, and 
to that democracy for the German people for 
which we profess to be fighting. With the clause 
to the effect that there may be indemnity for mani- 
fest wrong no one can quarrel. The entrance into 
Belgium, with deportation, was a pure act of bur- 
glary, and nations that commit burglary must of 



42 THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 

course be made to make reparation just as an in- 
dividual who burglarizes is always forced to do. 

As to five and six, no comment is necessary. The 
whole world is fast turning to that conclusion, and 
we doubt if it will need any urging by the time this 
war closes. But, while the Allied nations are saying 
this more and more, they must be sure that they 
themselves remember it after the war. For they 
have all sinned here, as well as has Germany. This 
war must see the end of "subject races." 



VI 

A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 
By Rev John Clifford, D.D., LL.D., of London 

EVERY day of 19 17 lifted to view the urgent 
necessity of a League of Nations, a league 
framed to secure and to maintain as far as 
possible to our fractious human nature the perma- 
nent peace of the politically organized peoples of 
the earth. 

It is not the first time men have been stirred by 
that divine vision. In the faraway ages of the 
world the Greeks felt the charm of it, and framed 
their councils to give it an operative place in the life 
and action of their conflicting States — not, we regret 
to say, with conspicuous success. Prophets and 
righteous men of the Hebrew race longed to create 
a Tribunal which should make wars to cease from 
the rivers to the end of the earth, but they died 
without setting it at work. Again and again in 
the Christian centuries our troubled fellows have at- 
tempted the colossal task of "ingeminating peace" 
amongst the warring tribes of the world; but the 
desire has never before been so strong, or the deter- 

43 



44 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

mination so fullblooded, or the prospect so bright 
as now, of casting out war, once and for ever, from 
the commonwealths of the world. 

Surely war has to go. Slavery as an institution 
has gone, never to return. Duelling has gone from 
the practice of deeply and sanely cultured nations, 
although it lingers in Germany, along with other 
brutalities ; and war, a relic of the state of savagery, 
though it has suddenly pounced upon the civilized 
world from its Prussian den like a tiger thirsting 
for blood, is doomed to destruction. We used to 
say so — at least every Christmas before 19 14, when 
we joined in the angel song of "peace on earth to- 
ward men of good will" ; but now we have a million 
more reasons for unrelenting hate of war and in- 
flexible will to get rid of it. 

"War" a "biological necessity"? Never! It is 
peace which is life, and life for evermore. The soul 
of the world can grow broad and strong and pure 
only in an atmosphere of peace. "War the healing 
medicine for nations?" Impossible! It is their 
death. Already it has smitten with paralysis the 
moral life of the people who prepared through thirty 
years for this Armageddon, and then plunged the 
whole world into its abysses. It is written in the 
annals of the ages that the people are "scattered who 
delight in war." 

The fact is, the Ideal Peace and the Ideal Right 
are one. They are not in conflict; they are neces- 
sary parts of the same whole, and dwell together in 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 45 

Him who is at the same time King of Righteousness 
and King of Peace, and are destined to dwell to- 
gether in His Kingdom. That ideal of the righteous 
peace is our ultimate objective in this war. That 
goal is clear. We know what we seek, and for what 
we are fighting ; but the road to the goal is hidden, 
and alas, at present we have to travel through a 
river of blood and death, so that we may arrive on 
the shores of a peace permanent as the everlasting 
hills and beneficent as the sunshine of God. 

It is for the sake of securing this peace and 
creating a League of Nations to guard it from at- 
tack, and to make it abiding, that President Wilson 
has brought the United States over to the side of 
the Allies. He insists at all times that "America 
has no grievance of her own" ; that they "came into 
the war because they are the servants of mankind, 
and will not accept any advantage from it." They 
seek "the peace of the world in and through right- 
eousness." To the President that is the alpha and 
omega of the situation, the end of ends. To attain 
that coveted goal he is devoting his masterly genius 
for statesmanship, his strong sense of justice, his 
broad democratic sympathies, his love of humanity, 
and the inexhaustible resources of the great Re- 
public. 

In like manner Mr. Asquith declares that such a 
League has been one of our aims from the begin- 
ning, and he speaks with authority, for on him, 
along with Viscount Grey, rests the responsibility 



46 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

of calling us to take our place in defence of the soul 
and the soil of wronged and invaded Belgium. 

Mr. Lloyd George goes further, and sees in what 
has been recently achieved in France the setting up 
of a "complete machine for dealing not merely with 
military and naval matters, but also with the finan- 
cial, economic, shipping and other affairs essential 
to the life of the nation." "This," he adds, "will 
have a greater effect on international relations than 
anyone can imagine at this particular moment." 

British Labour, with one mighty voice, affirmed 
the urgent necessity for creating such a "Super- 
National Authority." 

Representatives of other countries have spoken 
to the same effect, if not with the same strength and 
coherence, so that it is the manifest intention of 
the leaders of the peoples to get a League of Nations 
established, and assuredly it is the fixed determina- 
tion of the people in America and on the Continent 
not to rest until they get it. That is the beatific 
vision of the largest and best part of mankind. 
That is the clearly revealed purpose of God for the 
world. That is His plan for humanity's future, and 
it is ours to carry it out in the best way we can. 

For the new era in our international life can only 
be established on a basis that distinctly and com- 
pletely excludes all causes of war. War is an effect, 
and there is only one way of preventing it, and that 
is by getting at the roots of the causes and destroy- 
ing them. Men of good will in all lands, chosen 



THE MORAL^ AIMSlOF THE WAR 247 

and authorized by the people, must work together 
to form a Court of Conciliation, and determine its 
rules and methods of procedure. 

The basis on which the Court is founded must 
( i ) give equal liberty and status to all the political 
groups concerned, both small and great; (2) provide 
for economic expansion and economic restraint, and 
the exclusion of all legitimate grounds of unrest; 
(3) arrange for the settlement of disputes by arbi- 
tration; (4) start with the immediate reduction of 
armaments, and prepare for the ultimate extinction 
of all armed forces; (5) be universal in its range, 
embracing all nations that can be brought within 
its bounds; and (6) be worked so that it shall be 
manifest to all that it is impartial, holds the balance 
fair and even, inclines to no party or class or in- 
terest, but is mediatory, and reconciling all to one 
another in pursuit of the common good of the whole 
of the Commonwealths. 

So worked, it will be magnetic. Each nation will 
wish to come in and share the ministry to the 
world's peace and happiness it will afford. It is a 
high ideal, and difficult to reach; but it is our pal- 
pable duty to undertake the task and actualize the 
ideal as far as we can. 

Surely we have enough of the old system. It is a 
political order that inevitably sooner or later pro- 
duces war; and, even when we are not actually 
fighting, we are living in what we call an "armed 
peace," which is fatal to social well-being, aggran- 



48 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

dizes the few, and pauperizes and debases the many; 
wastes not only the financial but the moral and spir- 
itual resources of the nations ; condemns men to be 
the slaves and tools of those who arrogate the right 
to control them ; hinders the free and full develop- 
ment of the manhood of the individual ; and blocks 
the way to the true progress of mankind. What we 
need is a system that makes peace as inevitable as 
war is now. The safety of the people is the supreme 
law, and that safety must be guarded against the 
intrigues of wild and unbalanced despots, the wiles 
of diplomatists, and the fevered ambitions of mili- 
tarists, to whom war is meat and drink, and all in 
all. 

Now, it is certain that America could not have 
taken its place by our side in this strife, after long 
and mature deliberation, had not our aims and ob- 
jects been directed to that end. No people has done 
more for peace than the Americans. Year after 
year her most capable and illustrious citizens, law- 
yers and editors, preachers and statesmen, have met 
at the Mohonk Conference to devise methods of 
ending war. Millions of dollars have been freely 
given and spent in promoting that holy cause. No 
country has a literature on war, its causes, its evils, 
and its cure, surpassing in extent or in ability and 
practical value that which her sons and daughters 
have produced for the guidance of the world. In 
June, 191 5, a League to Enforce Peace was formed 
in Philadelphia by 400 of the most representative 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 49 

and influential men of the United States; and that 
League is, like the rest of the millions of America, 
heart and soul and will with us in this war, because 
it is a war to enforce peace, and to make peace 
eternal. 

They know, and we know, that we are not fight- 
ing for fighting's sake, or for revenge, or to punish 
the authors of this war, or for territory or trade, 
or to interfere directly with the internal government 
of the Central Powers; but for universal peace, a 
"clean" peace, "secure" from war's alarms, anxieties 
and uncertainties, not dependent on the caprice of 
military powers, but the abiding peace our modern 
world must have to accomplish its God-given mis- 
sion in these times. 



VII 

THE MORAL CONFLICT 
By Rev. Arthur Judson Brown, D.D., LL.D. 

NARLY two million Americans are under arms. 
Five hundred thousand are in France and 
more are going every month. There is no 
audience in the United States which does not include 
those who have sons or other relatives in the Army 
or Navy. Seventeen nations are waging war and 
forty millions of men are in uniform. Battles have 
been fought not only in Europe but in Asia, Africa 
and South America. Northern France is in ruins. 
Belgium is a military prison. Every child in Poland 
and Serbia is said to be dead or dying. Syrians 
and Persians are starving. Armenians have been 
nearly exterminated by murder or privation. Black 
men in Africa have killed each other at the orders 
of white officers. Villages have been burned in the 
South Sea Islands. Canada, Australia, and New 
Zealand, have sent their sons to die in the trenches 
of Flanders. One hundred and twenty-five thou- 
sand Chinese are in France. Four hundred thou- 
sand men of India are on the firing line. Japan, 

50 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 51 

China, and Siam have declared war. The scenes 
of ancient wars are again the scenes of conflict. 
Egypt is a military camp. Mesopotamia is a bat- 
tle field. The wilderness of Sinai has once more 
seen marching men. The Mount of Olives and 
the Hill of Golgotha bristle with cannon. The 
streets of the Holy City resound with the tramp 
of armed men. Judea is seamed with trenches, 
and airships fly over the land where Hebrew proph- 
ets spoke and where walked before men the Son of 
God. 

As for our part in this gigantic struggle, we have 
said through President Wilson that "what we de- 
mand in this war is nothing peculiar to ourselves. 
It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in ; 
and particularly that it be made safe for every peace- 
loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its 
own life, determine its own institutions and be as- 
sured of justice and fair dealing by the peoples of 
the world as against force and selfish aggression." 
Never has a people entered a war in such an altru- 
istic spirit. We love peace and hate war. We were 
not prepared for war. We are three thousand miles 
away from the scene of conflict. Our historic pol- 
icy is to avoid entangling alliances with other na- 
tions. But in spite of these things, in spite of our 
knowledge of the horrors that war involves, we have 
entered the struggle; and we are unhesitatingly 
spending billions of money and giving up our be- 
loved sons; and we say, as Martin Luther said at 



52 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

the Diet of Worms: "God help us, we can do no 
other !" 

The churches have a special duty in this time of 
world emergency. Except the press, no other 
agency has such access to intelligent public opinion 
and therefore such responsibility for helping to 
shape it aright. They ought to be deeply concerned 
in this war. True patriotism is a religious virtue. 
We do not love our country in any narrow or sel- 
fish sense. We refuse to baptize greedy profiteering 
and lust of power with the name of patriotism. But 
we believe that the cause for which our country is 
standing in this war is directly related to those 
great truths for which the Church stands and to 
which it is the duty of the Church to testify ; namely, 
righteousness, justice, liberty and brotherhood. We 
do not claim that our country is perfect, but we do 
claim that on this issue it is right — unreservedly, 
unequivocally and absolutely right, and that as such 
the churches ought to support it with all their 
strength. 

We should emphasize the moral aims of the war. 
We are interested in its political aims, but they are 
not what the churches are best qualified to achieve. 
As citizens, we are concerned with them, but as 
churchmen it is not for us to decide matters which 
belong to the President. We stand by him with full 
confidence in his wider knowledge and patriotic pur- 
pose as our nation's Commander-in-Chief. But the 
churches are specifically concerned with the moral 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 53 

aims of the war. For its aims are essentially 
moral. President Wilson has said that we do not 
seek territory nor indemnity nor revenge. We 
have been grievously wronged; but while the 
wrongs committed against us undoubtedly had 
much to do with forcing us into the war, we 
are not fighting on their account alone. Amer- 
ica's part in the war would be justified if not an 
American had been killed and not a dollar's worth 
of American property destroyed. We are in this 
war because it is fundamentally a war between 
Pagan and Christian ideas of the organization of 
the world; because it is a conflict between the law 
of the jungle and the law of brotherhood in inter- 
national relations; because it is to determine 
whether the people exist for the State or the State 
for the people; whether nations are to be ruled by 
emperors who claim divine right to do as they 
please, or by rulers who are responsible to the peo- 
ple; because no people on the planet is safe as long 
as a powerful nation comes into the family of na- 
tions armed to the teeth and animated by principles 
and ambitions which make it an intolerable menace 
and compel all other peoples also to arm and fight 
or to accept serfdom. On these issues there can be 
no compromise. Others may be susceptible of ad- 
justment, but this must be decided one way or the 
other. The whole future of the human race is at 
stake. No peace which leaves these fundamental 
issues undecided can be permanent. The war must 



64 PRESIDENT WILSON ANB 

be won either by a victory of the Allies or by a 
reform of the German Government by the German 
people, or by both. I do not venture to prophesy 
regarding its duration. I hope that the end is near. 
But if the war must go on until far greater sacrifices 
shall have been made and we shall be crippled or 
destroyed, we can only say that such a cause is 
worth dying for, even as Christ Himself died that 
the world might be saved. Some things are worse 
than death. 

And after the war, we must have a League of 
Nations so constituted and with such powers that it 
can prevent, or at least minimize, the danger of 
future wars. Nations hitherto have been at the 
stage of a frontier mining camp two generations ago 
when the individual had no protection for his life 
and property except what he could enforce with his 
own revolver, nor was there any external restraint 
upon him in case he chose to rob or kill another man. 
Orderly society began with a public sentiment which 
found expression in courts and police. To-day in 
a civilized land, the individual is not permitted to 
be jury, judge and executioner in his own case. He 
is not permitted to attack his fellow men, and if he 
does so he is sternly punished. If he himself is 
wronged, he can appeal to the law. The time has 
come when governments should act upon the same 
principle in their international relations. There 
must be a League of Nations with its courts and 
boards of arbitration and conciliation, and with the 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 55 

means of enforcing its decisions against lawless and 
unprincipled governments which make themselves 
world criminals. 

The churches can mightily help in this time of 
need. Most of us are debarred by age or sex from 
military service, but we have "our bit" to do in 
making these aims clear ; in unwavering support of 
the Government ; in aiding in the moral and spirit- 
ual welfare of our army and navy; and in oppos- 
ing those evils in our national life which impair our 
ability to wage a great war for noble ends. Our 
heroic soldiers and sailors will be heartened by the 
knowledge that the nation at home is united in sup- 
porting them and praying for them, and in creating 
those world conditions which will conserve the re- 
sults of the triumph of the cause to which they are 
giving "the last full measure of devotion." 

This is the wider battle field on which we fare 
forth as a people. It is not merely the strife of 
arms, but the strife of ideals, the effort to advance 
the Kingdom of God upon earth. Our primary 
object is not peace but righteousness, not only be- 
cause righteousness is more important than peace 
but because, in the words of the Prophet Isaiah, 
"the work of righteousness shall be peace and the 
effect of righteousness quietness and confidence for- 
ever." That is to say, peace is not the cause of 
righteousness but the result of it, and in making 
righteousness prevail we are securing permanent 
peace; "quietness and confidence forever" 



56 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

For this titanic struggle the duty of Americans 
is not confined to the young men of military age 
and fitness who enter the army and navy. They 
have a great service to render and may God give 
them strength and courage for it. We want them 
to feel that we are behind them with unmeasured 
sympathy and determination and prayer. But of 
what avail for them to win a victory on the battle- 
field if the nation and the world for which they win 
it shall not be able to utilize it aright? In making 
the world safe for democracy and democracy safe 
for the world every one of us, old and young, men 
and women, should have a part. Field Marshal 
Haig has recently said that "the war will be won 
by twenty-five per cent of military and seventy-five 
per cent of other forces of which those represented 
by the churches are the greatest. ,, 

Because we are waging a war for moral ends and 
expect the blessing of God in doing it, let us keep 
our motives and conduct upon a moral plane worthy 
of our cause and of the Divine help that we seek. 
Let us not kill women and children because our 
enemies do so. Let us be on our guard against 
evils in America which we denounce in Germany. 
Let us realize that this is a war not merely of armies 
and governments but of peoples, and that for its 
successful prosecution the whole nation must co- 
operate. Shirking, profiteering, extravagance, self- 
indulgence, graft, and vice, bad at any time, are 
high treason now. "Sanctify yourselves/' said 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 57 

Joshua to the Hebrew people as they stood upon 
the bank of the Jordan just before they began their 
struggle to conquer the promised land. "Observe 
to do according to all that is written" in the "Book 
of the Law." Then and then only "thou shalt make 
thy way prosperous and have good success," and 
"the Lord thy God" be "with thee whithersoever 
thou goest." 

This is the splendid duty to which we are called. 
To have any part in it, however small, is to have 
one of the most inspiring privileges that can come 
to the sons of men. As Whittier said a generation 
ago, so we may now say with even greater truth 
and with reference to this more stupendous crisis: 

"Our fathers to their graves have gone ; 
Their strife is past, their triumph won ; 
But sterner trials wait the race 
Which rises in their honoured place; 
A moral warfare with the crime 
And folly of an evil time. 

"So let it be. In God's own might 

We gird us for the coming fight, 

And, strong in Him whose cause is ours 

In conflict with unholy powers, 

We grasp the weapons He has given, — 

The Light, and Truth, and Love of Heaven." 

What Mordecai said of old to Esther at a crisis 
in the history of the Hebrew people, God is surely 



68 THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 

saying to the American churches: "If thou alto- 
gether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall relief 
and deliverance arise from another place, but thou 
and thy father's house shall perish ; and who know- 
eth whether thou art not come to the kingdom for 
such a time as this?" 



VIII 

THE PRESIDENT'S INTERNATIONAL 
IDEAL 

By Wm. I. Hull, Ph.D. 

AS we look out upon the world to-day, it is 
r\ obvious that the future will be ruled, at least 
for a time, by one of four ideals. 

These are the ideals of nationalities and of small 
nations to survive and to develop unhindered their 
own cultural ideals, of large nations to grow ever 
larger and more unified, of rival alliances among 
great powers, and of genuine internationalism. 

The sentiment of nationality, in the first place, 
has received such strong stimulus during the present 
war, both from attacks upon and concessions to it, 
that it may assert itself far more strongly than ever 
before and, in its contest with nationalism, succeed 
in breaking up such nations as Austria-Hungary, 
Russia, Turkey, Germany, and the British Empire 
into their constituent elements. Whether these ele- 
ments will become autonomous members of loose 
confederations, or politically independent, will de- 
pend on how far the pendulum swings back from 

59 



60 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

the nationalistic ideals of the Nineteenth Century. 
If the Bolsheviki succeed in making their revolution 
world-wide we may expect to see, in addition to an 
industrial transformation, a world made up politi- 
cally of small self-governing communities similar to 
the city-states among the ancient Greeks. 

On the other hand, if the nationalistic ideal of 
union is to be carried still further in the Twentieth 
Century, we may look forward to the complete sup- 
pression of the aspirations of small nationalities for 
civil, political, linguistic, religious and educational 
rights, and to their entire absorption in one or an- 
other of the Great Powers. This process may even 
apply to small nations which have hitherto been in- 
dependent ; for the world to-day and for some time 
in the past has been a very unsafe place for the little 
fellows in the Family of Nations. Even the Great 
Powers have felt none too secure in their bigness, 
and it is probable that they may strive to increase 
to the utmost both their size and their military 
strength. Hence a continuation and intensification 
of the competitive increase of armaments, and of all 
those rivalries in trade, commerce, foreign invest- 
ment, and the exploitation of backward lands and 
peoples, which have made the nations of the world 
like a nest of African serpents, each striving fiercely 
to raise its head above its fellows and sting them 
to death or submission. 

Again, since only one can be first, in such a strug- 
gle, and the other Great Powers must yield to the 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 61 

first, the plan of alliances which gave rise to the 
Entente Cordiale and the Triple Alliance may be 
carried still farther and divide the earth and domin- 
ion over it among such world-centres as Central 
Europe, the British Empire, and Pan-America. Or, 
if the imperial dream of the extreme Pan-German- 
ists and Pan-Jingoes everywhere comes true, the 
earth may be divided politically as well as geograph- 
ically into two hemispheres, with Central Europe 
joining hands with Islam, Russia, China, Japan and 
India, and lined up against the remnants of the 
British Empire allied with Pan-America. What the 
intensification of rivalry in militarism of every form 
and in economic imperialism would mean under such 
circumstances, and what an armageddon would 
probably result, the imagination and the moral sense 
refuse to contemplate. 

Since our country is relatively free from the 
problems of nationality such as beset nearly all the 
other great powers, and we are optimistic about the 
forces which still threaten even our Union, we are 
more interested in the second and third alternatives 
noted above. Some of our fellow-countrymen fore- 
see a future of unprecedented nationalistic assertion, 
and demand that, while still continuing to profess 
a trust in God, we shall "take our own part" and 
"keep our powder dry." Divested of persiflage, this 
counsel means that our navy shall exceed Great 
Britain's, our army Germany's, and our air-fleet that 
of France. It means, also, as German "efficiency" 



62 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

in warfare has taught us, that the men at the front 
shall be supported by a nation whose political, in- 
dustrial, educational, religious, moral, domestic and 
personal life has been revolutionized and made fully 
consonant with the demands of successful warfare. 
It means that our part of the earth's surface, as 
well as the rest of the planet, shall be dominated 
by Mars; and this in no faint-hearted, halfway 
measure, but "up to the hilt," and "with both hands 
and feet." Others of our countrymen believe 
in a future ruled by alliances and pin their faith to 
a diplomatic policy of "entangling alliances" which 
would make Washington and the other founders of 
the Republic turn over in their graves, and which 
would probably send most of our posterity into their 
graves. These advocates of a "strenuous" inter- 
national life have no confidence in the ability of 
even the United States of America to "go it alone," 
and are eager to line up the New World of the 
West against the Old World of the East, with the 
survival of the fittest, — the fittest to fight, — and 
world domination by the survivor, as the issues be- 
tween them. With such stakes and such combatants, 
the war of a half-century or a hundred years hence 
would as far outrank the war of today as this does 
the Napoleonic wars of a century ago ; while during 
the interval of recuperation and preparedness man- 
kind would bid farewell to all that is worth while in 
a world of democracy, civilization and Christianity. 
It is small wonder, then, that lovers of God and 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 63 

humanity should be eagerly scanning the future's 
horizon for still another alternative to political dis- 
integration, nationalistic extravagance, and defen- 
sive and offensive alliances to the nth degree. Pres- 
ident Wilson has caught the vision of this alterna- 
tive, which comes in the guise of genuine interna- 
tionalism and he has given prophetic utterance to 
its meaning, its imperative summons, and its ulti- 
mate triumph. 

Even as the true statesman in the midst of a bitter 
political campaign refuses to sacrifice his ideals on 
the altar of victory, so President Wilson refuses to 
adopt as his motto, "Anything to win the war!" 
He is constantly pressing home upon the American 
people and the Allies the insistent question, "What 
is the use of winning the war, if we do not win its 
real objects? Why lose the good we have, the good 
which generations of heroes and martyrs have won 
for us, in blind, unreasoning quest of victory?" 
And thus, once more, to our nation, as nineteen cen- 
turies ago to individuals, is pressed home the great 
inquiry, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain 
the whole world, and lose his own soul." 

Into the heart of the world's intercourse, our 
President is making a gallant effort to infuse the 
life-blood of Christianity. For the law of the jun- 
gle, he would substitute the law of Christ; for de- 
structive competition, the golden rule, co-operation, 
mutual service. He would apply in internal rela- 
tions the doctrine, — so familiar in our churches, so 



64 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

foreign to our chancelleries,— of "bear ye one an- 
other's burdens." For a suicidal struggle to force 
"a place in the sunshine," he would put into practice 
the policy of conciliation and the doctrine of recon- 
ciliation. Instead of international anarchy, he 
would substitute international government. Instead 
of exploiting the "backward peoples," he would ap- 
ply the maxim of Noblesse oblige, and would sum- 
mon all nations to mutual aid in their ascent of "the 
world's great altar-stairs" up to the law and order, 
peace and justice which constitute the true sunshine 
of God. 

Governments representative of the people in every 
land; the democratic control of diplomacy; self- 
determination of nations large and small; freedom 
of the seas and free access to the seas ; no "economic 
war after the war," but "the open door" to every 
one; restoration of devastated lands as a world 
task; the reduction and limitation of armaments; 
the development of genuinely international means of 
conciliating differences, adjudicating disputes, and 
performing the world's work by and for all the 
world's people. Such is the Magna Carta, the Fifth 
Symphony, the Sermon on the Mount, of the new 
internationalism. 

Will America follow this leadership? Will 
America blaze the way? As the Founders of the 
Republic in 1787 summoned Americans to "think 
Continentally" and to rise upon the stepping-stones 
of extreme State Sovereignty to the heights of the 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 65 

new Constitution and Union, so to-day the sum- 
mons has gone forth to our fellow-countrymen and 
the world to "think Internationally" and to rise 
upon the stepping-stones of extreme National Sov- 
ereignty to the heights of the new Internationalism. 
Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much 
be required; unto America much has been given. 
The Old World which now lies wounded nearly unto 
death has done its best for us in centuries past ; can 
we repay that debt in part by leading its nations 
along the path of disarmament and judicial settle- 
ment, of conciliation and co-operation, which has 
led the States of our Union to such abounding peace 
and progress? 

"Once to every man and nation 
Comes the moment to decide, 

In the strife of truth with falsehood, 
For the good or evil side. 



Hast thou chosen, oh my people ?" 

Just now our ears are deafened by the tumult and 
the shouting of the present conflict; but under its 
cover are rallying among every nation the forces 
of reactionary imperialism, preparatory to carrying 
on after the war the old, old struggle of militarism 
and industrial or political autocracy against the 
rights of men and the peace of nations. With the 
national flag as a fetich, with an appeal to the fears 



66 THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 

and prejudices of nations, they are entrenching 
themselves in readiness for the impending conflict. 
Already the lines are drawn through every nation, 
with the junkers, the special interests, the old gods 
of lust and selfishness and bloodshed on one side and 
the hosts of forward-looking men and the God of 
peace and righteousness on the other. The leaders 
on one side in this struggle are skulking under 
ground, evading the true issue, dulling the thoughts 
and sharpening the passions of their followers ; the 
leader on the other side has made his gallant appeal 
to all the world and sent it forth on the wings of the 
morning to the farthest confines of the night. Will 
America be the first to respond whole-heartedly and 
aright, as the Israelites did of old, to the challenge 
of this, our modern, American Joshua: "And if it 
seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose ye this 
day whom ye will serve: whether the gods which 
your fathers served on the other side of the flood, 
or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell ; 
but as for me and my house, we will serve the 
Lord." 



IX 



GROUNDS OF HOPE IN THE PRESENT 
CRISIS 

By Rev. Henry Churchill King, D.D., LL.D. 

WHAT are some of the grounds of hope in 
this supreme crisis? 

I. We may rejoice first of all that the 
issues are clearing, that the great ends are coming 
out, that the significant trends in this world struggle 
are becoming clear. This itself is a cause for hope, 
— that we are beginning to be able to trace some law 
and order in the chaos, and therefore becoming able 
to act both intelligently and unselfishly. 

2. As a consequence, it is a further ground for 
hope that the present world situation can be seen 
to be no accident, no mysterious divine providence, 
but a logical moral outcome of what preceded. We 
are being compelled to see the logical consequences 
of the positions of the nations, and that on a world- 
wide scale. The inescapable consequences of Chris- 
tian and of anti-Christian policies are becoming un- 
mistakably manifest. We must choose between 

67 



68 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

them. The inevitable final results to all men, of 
exclusive national selfishness and of immeasurable 
national arrogance, are to be read in Belgium and 
Armenia. The folly, the ultimate impossibility, and 
the terrors of an anti-Christian philosophy of the 
state are to be seen, too, in that indescribably deso- 
lated Belgium and France and in outraged Armenia, 
demonstrable to every sense and faculty of man. 
For there has been there made a veritable hell on 
earth, in which life is not worth living. There is 
here revealed, not merely the savagery of barbarism, 
but a deliberately adopted, scientifically developed, 
and philosophically defended fiendish terrorism, in- 
finitely more threatening than native barbarism. 

The terrible consequences upon the perpetrators 
themselves bear witness. Is there any spectacle 
more terrifying than that a Christian nation should 
be proud of the desolation which it has produced, 
(witness the legend on the ruins of France — "Do 
not curse ; just wonder") and be morally blind to its 
own shame and to the abhorrence which it has 
awakened in the rest of the civilized world? Out 
of this same national arrogance and selfishness has 
grown Germany's utter inability to read any other 
people aright. 

But it should be remembered at the same time 
that the progress of events in this war is bringing 
out with similar increasing clearness all the incon- 
sistencies of the Allies. Wherever there has been 
unfair treatment of other races; wherever there has 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 69 

been failure in a true democracy, there the Allies 
too are forced to face a new challenge. Ireland and 
India and Persia and Finland and the Balkans and 
Madagascar, our own treatment of coloured races, 
and unwarranted Italian ambitions, all demand to 
be faced. It is a day of world judgment. "There 
is nothing covered up, that shall not be revealed; 
and hid, that shall not be known." And such a day 
of judgment is at the same time a day of hope. 

3. The terribleness of the cost of the struggle 
is for religious faith, as I have elsewhere said, also 
a ground of hope. That the cost in money of this 
single war should months ago have been more than 
twice the total debt of the world in 1914, and have 
now grown to more than eighty billion dollars ; that 
nations with more than a billion of population 
should already be directly involved in the war,— 
these are only external signs of the still more ter- 
rible cost in physical and mental anguish, in loss of 
life and in waste of moral resources. Men's own 
indignant sense of this awful price will demand that 
the future shall show some corresponding advances. 
We can hardly believe in the overruling providence 
of God at all, and not look for commensurate gains 
for the race. Surely such immeasurable sacrifice, 
however blind it may have been at given points, is 
not, under God, to be poured out in vain. 

4. Nor are we to leave out of consideration as 
a reason for hope the lasting value of the extensive 
peace propaganda which preceded the war. That 



70 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

has undoubtedly opened the eyes of men, as they 
have never been opened before, to the barbaric bru- 
tality, to the terrible and manifold cost of war, and 
to the challenge which it brings to all rational civil- 
ization and to every ideal interest. At best this war 
must be felt to be — what some one has declared it — 
"the savagery of civilization on the march to save 
the world from the civilization of savagery." How- 
ever short-sighted some pacifists may be, the great 
essentials of the peace propaganda were sound, and 
they ought to help all the nations, and America 
especially, to hate war, to keep free from war mad- 
ness, to retain sense of proportion, and to cherish 
a deep care for a better civilization than the world 
yet knows. 

It is quite possible to believe that a nation must 
take its part in this war, — as I certainly do believe 
for America, — and still to believe that war is an 
essentially evil thing. It is an English publicist who 
says: 

"I avow myself an extreme pacifist! I do not 
merely want to end this war, I want to nail down 
war in its coffin. Modern war is an intolerable 
thing .... It is disaster. It may be a necessary 
disaster, .... but for all that I insist it remains 
waste, disorder, disaster." 

To these words a thoughtful American has 
added : 

"It is in hearty accord with the spirit of this state- 
ment of Wells that some pacifists enter this war, 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 71 

not exultant, buoyantly shouting for our country's 
flag, but soberly, consecrated to a magnificent 
charge, but nevertheless humiliated, because war has 
come only as an accusation, a great indictment 
against us all, and America especially, that would-be 
Republic of Man, because we have not made mani- 
fest quickly enough our high destiny among the 
nations, have not realized to the limit even of to- 
day's human capacity the possibilities of our conse- 
crated democracy." 

In that speaks a true pacifism that faces the facts 
on both sides ; that sees both the terror of war, and 
the still greater terror of an ignoble surrender of 
the fruits of all Christian civilization. 

5. It is also a ground for hope in the present 
crisis that the issues are seen to be at bottom so 
thoroughly moral and religious and even Christian. 
While this fact itself adds to the gravity of the 
crisis, it at the same time manifestly increases its 
significance. Here is no mere blind brute struggle. 
We need not believe "that a majority of civilized 
mankind is fighting and sacrificing, all without 
reason and significance for human progress." On 
the contrary, as we have seen, interests of the high- 
est conceivable order are involved in this war; so 
involved that it is neither travesty nor exaggeration 
to call this war on the part of America a truly Holy 
War. For grave as the crisis is, we may expect the 
reason and conscience of the race to reassert them- 
selves. We may believe that national moral blind- 



72 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

ness and self -stultification are not permanently to 
continue. 

6. That means, in the next place, that we may 
believe that the war contains in itself the incidental 
opportunity for a great zvorld advance toward a 
more Christian civilization. For the enormous 
tasks that the war has compelled, we may hope, will 
kindle the imagination and enlist energy for still 
greater constructive world tasks to follow. As 
Lloyd George said to a labour deputation : 

"Don't always be thinking of getting back where 
you were before the war. Get a really new world. 
I firmly believe that what is known as the after-the- 
war settlement will direct the destinies of all classes 
for generations to come. I believe the settlement 
after the war will succeed in proportion to its 
audacity. The readier we are to cut away from the 
past the better we are likely to succeed. Think out 
new ways, new methods, of dealing with old prob- 
lems. I hope no class will be harking back to the 
pre-war conditions. If every class insists upon 
doing that then God help this country. Get a new 
world." 

In this new world, we may hope that there will 
be a completer mastery over the ambiguous forces 
of civilization we noted — the solidarity of the world 
life, the enormously increased resources of power 
and wealth and knowledge; the extent of forced 
co-operation; and, also, a more consistent working 
through of the positively helpful characteristics of 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 73 

the world-order — the democratic trend, the league 
to enforce peace, and the new internationalism. 

All this should lead to great social gains, and to 
the permeation of all civilization with the spirit, the 
standards, and ideals of Christ — a true conquest of 
Christ over individuals, classes, institutions, nations, 
and races. 

7. A special ground of hope is to be found in 
the positively helpful factors, noted in the changing 
world-order — the democratic trend, the virtual 
existence already of a league of nations to enforce 
peace, and the new actual internationalism. 

(1) First of all, the general trend, the world 
over, toward democracy, is most notable. Every 
nation, even in Asia, except Afghanistan, is living 
under some form of constitution. China, with its 
immense territory and population, has become re- 
publican, even unstably so. The Russian revolution, 
in spite of the grave anxieties it now stirs, was a 
prodigious achievement in itself, and prophetic of 
similar changes elsewhere. Everywhere the war 
bids fair, with simple justice, to extend the suffrage 
and the recognition of the rights of the common 
people among all the belligerents. The sweeping 
changes in the suffrage which are planned in Eng- 
land, including its extension to women, and the 
bringing of India into the Imperial Conference, are 
illustrations. Situations inconsistent with an essen- 
tially democratic viewpoint, men more and more 
feel are not be defended. Even in Germany demo- 



74 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

cratic aspirations have found vigorous utterance. 
Maximilian Harden speaks undoubtedly for many 
Germans when he says: 

"Because our existence depends on it — demands 
it — must we go toward democracy. There is democ- 
racy all around; who dares stop the wheel of his- 
tory? The union of peoples is on the way; do we 
wish to freeze outside?" 

Scheidemann, leader of the majority of the So- 
cialist Party in the Reichstag, declares: 

"The whole world sees among our enemies more 
or less developed forms of democracy, and in us it 
sees only Prussians." 

Ledebour dared to say in the Reichstag: "We 
regard a republic as a coming inevitable develop- 
ment in Germany." 

An equally prominent English publicist similarly 
remarks: 

"The stars in their courses, the logic of circum- 
stances, the everyday needs and everyday intelli- 
gence of man, all these things march irresistibly to- 
wards a permanent world peace based on democratic 
republicanism." 

(2) Moreover, it is not too much to say — and it 
is a most significant and encouraging fact — that, 
now that the cause of the Allies is cleared of the 
gross inconsistency of the Russian autocracy, a 
League of Nations to enforce peace is already in 
existence. As one of our most thoughtful editors 
puts it: 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 75 

"The league of peace exists sooner than any of us 
dared to hope. What was a paper plan and a theo- 
retic vision two years ago, is today a reality. The 
liberal peoples of the world are united in a common 
cause." 

(3) It is of even deeper significance, that, as the 
war has spread and the needs of the world have be- 
come greater, a new internationalism has arisen, and 
a supernational control of necessities has been prac- 
tically forced upon the Allies. The New Republic's 
statement must impress the thinking man: 

"What is being arranged in Washington these 
days is really a gigantic experiment in internation- 
alism. For the first time in history the food supply, 
the shipping, the credit, and the manpower of the 
nations are to be put under something like joint 
administration. We are witnessing the creation of 
a supernational control of the world's necessities. 
The men who are charged with conducting this war 
are now compelled to think as international states- 
men. The old notions of sovereignty no longer 
govern the facts. Three of the unifying forces of 
mankind are at work — hunger, danger and a great 
hope. They are sweeping into the scrap heap the 
separatist theories that nations should be self-suffic- 
ing economically and absolutely independent po- 
litically. ... A new and more powerful ma- 
chinery of internationalism is being created. It is 
a true internationalism because it deals not with 
dynastic and diplomatic alliances but with the co- 



76 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

operative control of those vital supplies on which 
human life depends. . . . This is the birth of the 
League of Nations." 

Such internationalism — built upon a true nation- 
alism, for they are not inconsistent — opens up a 
vision of a new world. For the problems here forced 
by the war are in truth always the only less critical 
problems of peace also. The earth and the race 
are perfectly capable of producing an adequate sup- 
ply of all that men need, the world over. Famines 
anywhere are truly unnecessary. The great prob- 
lems of peace are these same problems of an humane 
and scientific control of production, distribution and 
consumption. Here is opportunity for men's high- 
est powers in times of peace ; here, a great challenge 
for that liberation of human energies in peaceful 
outlets for which Bertrand Russell pleads. 

"The United States, we believe and hope (says 
another editor), is already permanently a member 
of an international federation that will finally, in 
some form or other, embrace all progressive coun- 
tries, and decide at a joint council table, those ques- 
tions which involve conflict of interests." 

There is thus opened the hope of such companion- 
ship on high aims, as the world has never seen, 
that should send a thrill of expectation through 
every aspiring man. Are we to allow this opportu- 
nity to be lost? 

8. The war has also brought new faith in the 
common men of all the nations. It is significant, 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 77 

that Barbusse's novel, Under Fire, which a distin- 
guished French dramatist calls the "first great work 
the war has given us," and which was recently 
awarded the Goncourt prize of 1916, is "an ardent 
tribute to the mute, inglorious millions of ordinary 
men constrained to heroism by circumstances, brave, 
determined, reliable, but not imbued with any mili- 
tary spirit — those millions of uprooted civilians who 
differ in every respect from the professional sol- 
dier": 

"They are not reckless of their lives, like bandits, 
nor blind with wrath, like savages. Despite the ef- 
forts to excite them, they are not excited. They are 
superior to every sort of transport. They are not 
drunk either literally or figuratively. They have 
come together, in full consciousness, as in full force 
and full health, to play once more the role imposed 
upon them by the madness of their kind. In their 
silence, in their immobility, in the masks of super- 
human calm on their visages, reflection and fear and 
longing are discernible. They are not the sort of 
heroes they are popularly supposed to be; but their 
sacrifice is nobler than those who have not seen them 
will ever be able to divine." 

9. With this new faith in the heroic quality of 
common men, there has come a like new faith in the 
rank and file of the nations. Men can talk no longer 
of degenerate France or England or of materialis- 
tic America. Belgium has proved itself possessed 
of a soul which she was not willing to sell. Nation 



78 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

after nation has refused to take the course that mere 
economics might dictate. Every belligerent has 
known that it must defend its cause before the public 
opinion of the world, and has devoted immense 
sums and energies to that end. Even the bitterest 
belligerents have been obliged to learn from one an- 
other, and so tacitly at least to acknowledge the 
worth of their enemies. It would be dastardly 
treachery for the Allies to forget the unstinted ser- 
vice of coloured races. Surely a practically demon- 
strable ground has thus been laid in this war for a 
parliament of nations — occidental and oriental, 
white and coloured. Races who are good enough to 
die for a cause, are good enough to live with and 
in it. 

'Thank God that man is more than all his hoarded 

gold, 
And in the storm of death his faith and valour hold. 
Thank God that peace is forging upon the anvil war, 
And a people's truth and honour more than riches 



10. There are specific hopes also, especially for 
the smaller nations, which this war permits us to 
cherish, in line with the avowed aims and principles 
of the Entente Allies, and with President Wilson's 
recent messages. Oh for a fairer, juster world! 
What Mr. Balfour says of the Central Powers, as 
Gibbons urges, must be said of all the powers : their 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 79 

"aggressive objects and unscrupulous methods" 
must be "discredited in the eyes of their own peo- 
ples." Belgium and France must be fully restored, 
and Belgium at least truly indemnified. Ranker in- 
justice cannot well be proposed, if less than this is 
done for Belgium; as even most socialists of all 
nations seem to believe. Serbia, too, must be re- 
stored. In general, the Balkan peninsula should be 
honestly guaranteed to the Balkan peoples. We 
should look for a new and independent Finland; 
for a new, united and independent Poland. One 
cannot help hoping that Japan will be large enough 
to fulfil her original promise and hand back the 
Shantung peninsula to China. The unspeakable Ar- 
menian massacre should be ample demonstration 
that the Turk should be driven absolutely out of 
Europe, and that Armenia and Syria should be 
entirely released from Turkish rule. If any power 
has ever demonstrated its utter unfitness to rule over 
other peoples, Turkey has done so. Some true doc- 
trine of the freedom of the seas should be wrought 
out and upheld by the league of nations to enforce 
peace — a freedom of the seas that is not simply 
dependent on the favour and good will of even the 
best nation, but is grounded in justice and due re- 
spect for the rights of all nations. 

ii. No Christian survey of the issues and out- 
comes of this world war could be complete, that did 
not note the religious bearings of the war. It may 
perhaps be said, in a word, that, while the war has 



80 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

unquestionably shaken the religious faith of many, 
the faith so shaken has been in general a faith not 
wholly Christian in the beginning. The shallow and 
sentimental types of Christianity have certainly 
proved themselves inadequate to the world's need, 
and we may rejoice in it. But on the other hand 
there seems to be as little doubt, that the great ma- 
jority of men haye been irrevocably driven back to 
a new sense of the absolute and indispensable need 
of moral purpose and deep religious faith both for 
significant personal living and for any high civiliza- 
tion, and that the Christianity of Christ himself has 
a clearer field than ever for the conquest of the 
world. As Mr. Britling says, "Religion is the first 
thing and the last thing, and until man has found 
God, and been found by God, he begins at no be- 
ginning, and works to no end." That Christian men 
should fail to see this great new opportunity would 
be disaster indeed. 

But we cannot honestly cherish these great hopes 
for humanity, and not work that they may come to 
pass. To that end, in the first place, we need to be 
unceasingly vigilant that we keep steadily before 
us the high aims with which we entered the war, 
and refuse to sully those aims by any unworthy con- 
duct of the war, and that we keep our spirits purged 
clean of all arrogance and hatred and bitterness. 
That will be no easy task. 

And by and through the war, and not merely 
after it, — for now is our opportunity — we may well 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 81 

have steadily in mind some such war programme as 
that briefly suggested by Mr. A. M. Simons: 

"Millions have died that the trampling war mad- 
ness might end. It is better to see that they have 
not died in vain than to bewail their dying. War 
burdens must become a means of expropriation, not 
exploitation. Military mobilization at the front 
and in the shops and on the farms must end in dem- 
ocratic industrial mobilization for peace. The place 
that has been won for labour in the parliaments of 
the world must be strengthened and used for the 
protection of workers when the war has ended. The 
war need for women's services must lead to her 
complete political and social emancipation. The care 
of peoples in war must show the way to the aboli- 
tion of poverty in peace." 



X 



THE CHURCH AND THE LEAGUE OF 
NATIONS 

By Rev. William Pierson Merrill, D.D. 

(Abstract of an address given in connection with 
the campaign on the Moral Aims of the War.) 

THE question may arise, "Why should this 
campaign be pushed among the churches ?'' 
The campaign has two objects: First, to 
show why the war must be won by America and 
her allies and to arouse a spirit of determined loyalty 
and enthusiasm, and second, to create a strong and 
intelligent interest in the idea to establish, as one 
outcome of the war, a League of Nations, pledged 
to maintain the peace of the world and to substitute 
judicial processes for war. If such a League of 
Nations is to be formed at the conclusion of the war, 
people must be thinking about it intensely and con- 
tinuously from now on. 

But it may be said that these matters are not par- 
ticularly related to the church. The winning of the 

82 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 83 

war is a national and governmental concern; the 
establishment of a League of Nations is a political 
idea. Why then should we not push this campaign 
among the people generally, rather than among the 
people of the Christian church? 

The answer is not simply that the churches have 
power and influence, which we desire to enlist on the 
side of the prosecution of the war and the establish- 
ment of a League of Nations. The reason for our 
pushing this campaign among the churches is rather 
in the fact that the church acknowledges a higher 
loyalty than that expressed in patriotism; a loyalty 
to truth, to God and His word, to Christ and His 
kingdom. We are convinced that Christian people 
will not be, and ought not to be, loyal to a govern- 
ment simply as a matter of course, or at least that 
their loyalty will be far more intense and vital if 
they understand that these higher issues are involved 
in the stand their government is taking. We believe 
we can show the people of the churches that their 
noblest faiths and dearest hopes are bound up with 
the success of America in this war and with the es- 
tablishment of a League of Nations as the outcome 
of the war. 

I. The War. The church is concerned in the win- 
ning of the war because of the issues directly in- 
volved in the war itself. 

i. The issue between the people and the kings. 

Our American history and traditions are no more 
vitally concerned in this struggle for popular rights 



84 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

against alleged divine rights than is our Christianity. 
Christ was and is the leader of true democracy. He 
saw the independent worth of individual manhood. 
He said, "call no man your master on the earth," 
and, "ye shall know the truth and the truth shall 
make you free." The church has been, on the whole, 
the great champion of human freedom. True de- 
mocracy and true religion have depended each upon 
the other. 

2. The issue between the heathen and Christian 
conception of greatness. 

Christ told his disciples that they were to have a 
different idea of greatness from that which prevailed 
in the world. The heathen counts great the man 
who lords it over his fellowmen, "But it shall not 
be so among you, but whosoever would be great 
among you, let him be your servant." These two 
ideas of greatness are locked in the struggle of this 
war. Germany turned aside from the path to great- 
ness through service and took the old discredited 
path through attempted lordship over others. 

3. The issue between nationalism and internation- 
alism, between selfishness and unselfishness, as the 
motive of international action. 

Germany is in the war because she did not trust 
other nations, because she frankly accepts the phi- 
losophy which says that there is no authority, and 
can be none, superior to an individual nation. 
America is literally and absolutely in the war with 
nothing to gain except the establishment of an inter- 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 86 

national order. This war is an issue between the 
spirit which seeks the best "place in the sun" and 
the spirit which seeks only one's proper place in a 
family of nations. Christianity is essentially inter- 
ested in all, rather than any group. It is based on a 
faith in the universal fatherhood of God and the 
universal brotherhood of man. The Christian 
church ought therefore to be vitally concerned in 
this contest between nationalism and international- 
ism. 

The church then has a great part to play in 
connection with the war, for the strength of such a 
war as America is waging is in the realm of the 
spirit, rather than anywhere else. It is of the ut- 
most importance that America's motives be kept 
high, her ideals pure, and that the disinterested 
spirit in which she entered the war be preserved 
blameless to the end of it. Here the church can give 
vital support. 

II. The League of Nations. With the details of 
the policy of the League of Nations, I am not now 
concerned, but I want to urge that the church ought 
to give itself to any extent that may be required 
to support the ideal of an international organization. 
The church is vitally interested in helping to estab- 
lish such a League of Nations. Why: 

i. Because the church can give to this movement 
indispensable support. 

(a) The church can impart a sanctity to the inter- 
national organization without which it can scarcely 



S6 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

hold its own in the world. People cannot arouse 
any great amount of enthusiasm over a world court 
or any cold scheme of organization. They need 
something which will give a sanctity to the move- 
ment, even as the flag stands for our country and 
helps to stimulate and support the instinct of pa- 
triotism. The international organization will need 
something which will exalt it above all local patriot- 
isms. Here the church can render indispensable 
aid. 

(b) The church can put a spirit into the inter- 
national organization without which it will fail. 
Nothing is more significant than the fact that Sir 
Edward Carson and Sir Frederick Smith and other 
speakers, who have recently discussed the project 
of a League of Nations, declare that the idea can 
never be put into successful operation without a 
very great extension of goodwill between nations. 
That is the peculiar function of the church. 

(c) The church can impart faith which is vital 
to the success of this movement. The great obstacle 
at present in the way of a League of Nations is 
the fact that people call it impracticable or Utopian. 
Many are saying "it is almost hopeless to try to 
establish a League of Nations, and yet there is no 
hope unless we can establish it." Now Christ came 
into human life to be the author and finisher of 
faith. It is the peculiar function of his church to 
infuse faith, the faith that can move mountains, into 
just such undertakings as this. The Christian church 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 87 

should welcome the opportunity to show that things 
that are impossible with men are possible with God. 

2. The second main reason why the church 
should be vitally interested in the movement to es- 
tablish a League of Nations is that the church will 
find itself in this movement. 

It is painfully evident that the church at present 
is not sure of itself, its function, its place, its power. 
To throw its energies into the movement for a 
League of Nations would help greatly. 

(a) As has been said, it would afford a chance for 
the church to develop and show a strong, living, 
practical faith. The church has suffered for lack 
of objects at once practical and daring. Such an 
object is here afforded. 

(b) Most important of all, this movement affords 
the church an opportunity to recover its interna- 
tional character. Time was when the church was 
an international organization. Say what we may in 
criticism of the church in the Middle Ages, there 
was this magnificent fact about it, that it was a 
supra-national organization calling for a loyalty 
greater than that paid to any separate nation or 
state. With all its immense gains, the Reformation 
brought one serious loss to Christianity, it split the 
church into separate bodies divided along national 
and social lines. Protestant Christianity has largely 
lost its consciousness of an international or supra- 
national character. Yet there has always lingered 
in the hearts of Christians a consciousness that the 



88 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

church ought to transcend the bounds of nationalty. 
Christians all over the world were shocked when the 
German church leaders at the outbreak of the war 
stood blindly for the national cause. The hesitancy 
of churchmen in America to speak sharply and de- 
cisively on the moral issues of the war, when it 
broke out, was largely due to a consciousness that 
the church should stand as an international fellow- 
ship. What a marvellous opportunity is afforded to 
the church to recover its international character 
through linking its life to an international organi- 
zation to which it may give something of the sanc- 
tity attaching to the idea of the Kingdom of God. 
Christianity would recover some of its lost artic- 
ulateness through uniting its fortunes with the cause 
of international organization. 

There are immense and weighty considerations in 
favour of the establishment of a League of Nations 
which appeal to us as citizens of America and of the 
world. It seems to be the only ground for hope 
of a durable peace. We should determine to fight 
on unflinchingly until the issue has been fought out 
between isolation and co-operation, between the 
waning cause of nationalism and the waxing cause 
of internationalism. The outcome of the war must be 
world organization. But above and beyond these 
considerations are the reasons which appeal to the 
Christian church. The League of Nations holds the 
promise of the future for Christianity. Through it 
once more will be realized the ideal so finely stated 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 89 

in an anonymous writing of the second century of 
the Christian era, "As the soul holds the body to- 
gether, so Christians hold the world together. God 
has assigned them this illustrious position, which it 
were unlawful for them to forsake." 



APPENDICES 

APPENDIX I 

THE LEADERS OF THE BRITISH CHURCHES 
SUMMON CHRISTIANS TO A LEAGUE OF 
NATIONS 

Base the Appeal on the Proposals of the President 
of the United States 

THE following appeal has been issued over the 
signatures of the Archbishop of Canterbury, 
the Bishop of Winchester, the Bishop of Oxford, 
the Bishop of Southwark, the Bishop of Peterborough, 
the Rev. Dr James Cooper, Moderator of the Established 
Church of Scotland ; the Rev. Dr. W. B. Selbie, the Rev. 
Dr. J. Scott Lidgett, the Rev. Dr. F. B. Meyer, the Rev. 
Dr. D. S. Cairns, the Rev. Dr. J. Estlin Carpenter, the 
Rev. Dr. Alexander Connell, the Rev. Father Plater, Lord 
Henry Bentinck, Lord Parmoor, the Rt. Hon. Arthur 
Henderson, George Lansbury, Arthur Mansbridge, Pro- 
fessor A. S. Peake, and Principal T. F. Roberts: 

"We, the signatories of this document, belonging to 
various Christian bodies, have noted with the greatest 
satisfaction the prominent place given by the President 
of the United States and by successive Prime Ministers 
and Foreign Secretaries of our own country to the pro- 
posal of a League of Nations. The idea has also, as was 
to be expected, won wide support among the official repre- 



92 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

sentatives of Christian communions, e.g., in the Pope's 
appeal to the powers last summer and in the recent Con- 
vocation of Canterbury. 

"But more is yet needed to make manifest and effective 
the full force of Christian conviction in its favour, still 
largely latent, but capable of being evoked if only the 
vital import of the idea be brought forcibly home to 
Christian people at large. 

"In the name, then, of the Prince of Peace, we would 
call on them duly to consider and openly to welcome the 
idea of such a league as shall safeguard international 
right and permanent peace and shall also have power in 
the last resort to constrain by economic pressure or armed 
force any nation refusing to submit to arbitration or inter- 
national adjudication in the first instance any dispute 
with another tending to war. 

"We believe that a new system of international law 
and authority, acting through an inclusive League of 
Nations in place of any balance of power, is a condition 
of a just and lasting peace, particularly as it affords 
means whereby the fresh demands of national life as they 
arise can be adjudicated upon and equitably satisfied. 

"Accordingly, we hold it to be of the utmost importance, 
as President Wilson has just emphasized, that such a 
league should not merely be contemplated as a more or 
less remote outcome of a future settlement, but should be 
put in the very forefront of the peace terms as their pre- 
supposition and guarantee. 

"Whether it be or be not practicable, without any slack- 
ening of the energy with which the war must be waged, 
to make a beginning upon the league as regards the Allies 
and neutrals, even before the peace conference, we do 
not venture to decide, though we think this course has 
much to commend it. But we are sure of the pressing 
need there is here and now of giving the League of 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 93 

'Nations the backing of an organized body of strong con- 
viction; sure, also, that this task offers to the Christian 
consciousness an opportunity to make its own spirit felt 
in national policy such as has not occurred heretofore 
since the outbreak of this war." 



APPENDIX II 

ANGLICAN BISHOPS ENDORSE LEAGUE OF 
NATIONS 

Sitting in Convocation during February, 1918, the 
Bishops of the Church of England gave definite and 
clearly expressed support to the idea of a League of 
Nations. The Bishop of Oxford proposed the following 
resolution : 

"That this House notes with special satisfaction the 
prominent place given by the President of the United 
States, and successive Prime Ministers and Foreign Sec- 
retaries of our country, to the proposal for a League of 
Nations. We desire to welcome in the name of the Prince 
of Peace the idea of such a league as shall promote the 
brotherhood of man and shall have power at the last resort 
to constrain by economic pressure, or armed force, any 
nation which should refuse to submit to an International 
Tribunal any dispute with another nation. And further 
we desire that such a League of Nations should not merely 
be regarded as the more or less remote consequence of 
peace, but that provision for its organization should be 
included in the conditions of the settlement." 

Dr. Gore said that no one in that House could have any 
doubt about the duty of fighting through the war, because 
it is a war in a great cause. Every time he went over 
the old ground he came out with the same assurance on 
this point. At the same time he was certain that the 
Church could not be true to its mission if it were not 

94 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 95 

alive to the danger of taking mere patriotism by itself 
as a complete guide. From time to time the Church had 
an opportunity of saying not the popular but the right 
thing at the moment. They had the call that a great 
statesman had given them, and they ought to welcome the 
idea of a League of Nations and keep it to the fore, not 
as a remote idea belonging to some Utopia, but as some- 
thing that could be brought into effect as the basis of 
an actual settlement at the end of the war. It was an 
opportunity that the Church must not miss. A consider- 
able section of the nation was watching anxiously to see 
what the Church would do, and as yet was disappointed. 
He felt that the time was fully ripe for such a resolution 
as he brought before the House. Before he sat down 
Dr. Gore emphasized the fact that the resolution was not 
in any way opposed to the sedulous prosecution of the 
war, which they all desired. 

The Bishop of Hereford said that the imagination of 
the working classes in the country had been touched by 
the utterances of President Wilson and our own Prime 
Minister on the subject of the League of Nations. They 
felt that the great sacrifices of the war could only be 
justified if some such scheme took practical shape as the 
outcome of it. He felt sure they were right, and it was 
with a real conviction that the Church was acting in this 
matter on the lines of her own divine and public duty 
that he seconded the motion. The people were filled with 
a passionate longing for peace, but also with a grim de- 
termination, from which nothing could turn them, to see 
the thing through to the only conclusion that could have 
justified its beginning or compensate for its sacrifices. 

The Archbishop of Canterbury said that the moment 
was one of supreme importance. They were one, heart 
and soul, in what they desired to say and do. The matter 
was a little outside their ordinary orbit of work, which 



96 THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 

was not concerned with politics, national or international. 
At such an hour as this all Christians were in the widest 
sense political, and those on whom special burdens of 
responsibility were laid could find no nobler interest than 
that of helping to make the coming peace of such a nature 
as to render the recurrence of the events of the last three 
years impossible. There were two ways of bringing about 
the escape from the war idea. In the first place by a 
change in the hearts and minds of men — the work to 
which the Church has set itself from the beginning, but 
wherein it has many times and in many ways lamentably 
failed. They did not, of course, despair of accomplishing 
that work, but they saw that it would be long before this 
change would come about. The other way was by turn- 
ing to account what was certainly at the moment growing 
in Europe — the desire for peace — by forming somehow 
a convention of nations, each of which would pledge itself 
to employ its power to protect any one of the members 
of the convention from aggression, by finding a satis- 
factory means of settling by arbitration the difficulties 
that arise. If this were done we should have adopted 
the best means of preventing a recurrence of the horrors 
of the last three years. They were right to do all in 
their power to bring about the accomplishment of the 
hopes inspired by the suggestion of a League of Nations, 
because in so doing they were looking forward to some- 
thing which is in accord with the mind of our Master 
Christ, the Prince of Peace. The Bishops of Norwich 
and Peterborough also spoke in support and the House 
of Convocation carried the resolution by a unanimous 
vote. 



APPENDIX III 
Extract from The Inter-Allied Labour War Aims 

MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY 

II. Whatever may have been the objects for which the 
war was begun the fundamental purpose of the Inter- 
Allied Conference in supporting the continuance of the 
struggle is that the world may henceforth be made safe 
for democracy. 

Of all the conditions of peace none is so important to 
the peoples of the world as that there should be hence- 
forth on earth no more war. 

Whoever triumphs, the peoples will have lost unless 
an international system is established which will prevent 
war. What would it mean to declare the right of peoples 
to self-determination if this right were left at the mercy 
of new violations, and were not protected by a super- 
national authority? That authority can be no other than 
the League of Nations, in which not only all the present 
belligerents, but every other independent state, should 
be pressed to join. 

The constitution of such a League of Nations implies 
the immediate establishment of an International High 
Court, not only for the settlement of all disputes between 
states that are of justiciable nature, but also for prompt 
and effective mediation between states in other issues 
that vitally interest the power of honour of such states. 
It is also under the control of the League of Nations 
that the consultation of peoples for purposes of self- 

97 



98 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

determination must be organized. This popular right can 
be vindicated only by popular vote. The League of 
Nations shall establish the procedure of international 
jurisdiction, fix the methods which will maintain the free- 
dom and security of the election, restore the political 
rights of individuals which violence and conquest may 
have injured, repress any attempt to use pressure or cor- 
ruption, and prevent any subsequent reprisals. It will be 
also necessary to form an International Legislature, in 
which the representatives of every civilized state would 
have their allotted share and energetically push forward, 
step by step, the development of international legislation 
agreed to by, and definitely binding upon, the several 
states. 

By a solemn agreement all the states and peoples con- 
sulted shall pledge themselves to submit every issue be- 
tween two or more of them for settlement as aforesaid. 
Refusal to accept arbitration or to submit to the settle- 
ment will imply deliberate aggression, and all the nations 
will necessarily have to make common cause, by using any 
and every means at their disposal, either economical or 
military, against any state or states refusing to submit 
to the arbitration award, or attempting to break the 
world's covenant of peace. 

But the sincere acceptance of the rules and decisions 
of the super-national authority implies, complete democ- 
ratization in all countries; the removal of all the arbitrary 
powers who, until now, have assumed the right of choos- 
ing between peace and war; the maintenance or creation 
of legislatures elected by and on behalf of the sovereign 
right of the people; the suppression of secret diplomacy, 
to be replaced by the conduct of foreign policy under the 
control of popular legislatures, and the publication of all 
treaties, which must never be in contravention of the 
stipulation of the League of Nations, with the absolute 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 99 

responsibility of the government, and more particularly 
of the foreign minister of each country to its legislature. 

Only such a policy will enforce the frank abandonment 
of every form of imperialism. When based on universal 
democracy, in a world in which effective international 
guarantees against aggression have been secured, the 
League of Nations will achieve the complete suppression 
of force as the means of settling international differences. 

The League of Nations, in order to prepare for the 
concerted abolition of compulsory military service in all 
countries, must first take steps for the prohibition of fresh 
armaments on land and sea and for the common limitation 
of the existing armaments by which the peoples are bur- 
dened; as well as the control of war manufactures and 
the enforcement of such agreements as may be agreed 
to thereupon. The states must undertake such manufac- 
tures themselves, so as entirely to abolish profit-making 
armament firms, whose pecuniary interest lies always in 
the war scares and progressive competition in the prepara- 
tion for war. 

The nations, being armed solely for self-defence and 
for such action as the League of Nations may ask them 
to take in defence of international right, will be left 
free, under international control either to create a volun- 
tarily recruited force or to organize the nation for 
defence without professional armies for long terms of 
military service. 

To give effect to the above principles, the Inter-Allied 
Conference declares that the rules upon which the League 
of Nations will be founded must be included in the treaty 
of peace, and will henceforth become the basis of the 
settlement of differences. In that spirit the Conference 
expresses its agreement with the propositions put for- 
ward by President Wilson in his last message: 

(i) That each part of the final settlement must be 



100 THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 

based upon the essential justice of that particular case, 
and upon such adjustments as are most likely to bring 
a peace that will be permanent. 

(2) That peoples and provinces are not to be bartered 
about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were 
mere chattels and pawns in a game, even the great game 
now forever discredited of the balance of power; but that 

(3) Every territorial settlement involved in this war 
must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the 
populations concerned, and not as a part of any mere 
adjustments of compromise of claims amongst rival states. 

(4) That all well-defined national aspirations shall be 
accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded 
them without introducing new or perpetuating old ele- 
ments of discord and antagonism that would be likely in 
time to break the peace of Europe, and, consequently, of 
the world. 



APPENDIX IV 

THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES ON 
A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 

"I have said, and shall say again, that when the great 
present war is over it will be the duty of America to 
join with the other nations of the world in some kind 
of a league for the maintenance of peace/' — Woodrow 
Wilson. 

FROM AN ADDRESS OF MAY 27, 1916 

"The longer the war lasts the more deeply do we be- 
come concerned that it should be brought to an end and 
the world be permitted to resume its normal life and 
course again. And when it does come to an end we 
shall be as much concerned as the nations at war to see 
peace assume an aspect of permanence, give promise of 
days from which the anxiety of uncertainty shall be 
lifted, bring some assurance that peace and war shall 
always hereafter be reckoned part of the common interest 
of mankind. 

"We are participants, whether we would or not, in the 

life of the world. The interests of all nations are our 

own also. We are partners with the rest. What affects 

mankind is inevitably our affair as well as the affair of 

the nations of Europe and of Asia 

****** 

"Only when the great nations of the world have reached 
some sort of agreement as to what they hold to be funda- 

101 



102 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

mental to their common interest, and as to some feasible 
method of acting in concert when any nation or group of 
nations seeks to disturb those fundamental things, can 
we feel that civilization is at last in a way of justifying 
its existence and claiming to be finally established. 
****** 

"Repeated utterances of the leading statesmen of most 
of the great nations now engaged in war have made it 
plain that their thought has come to this, that the prin- 
ciple of public right must henceforth take precedence 
over the individual interests of particular nations, and 
that the nations of the world must in some way band 
themselves together to see that right prevails as against 
any sort of selfish aggression; that henceforth alliance 
must not be set up against alliance, understanding against 
understanding, but that there must be a common agree- 
ment for a common object, and that at the heart of that 
common object must lie the inviolable rights of peoples 
and of mankind. 

"The nations of the earth have become each other's 
neighbours. It is to their interest that they should under- 
stand each other. In order that they may understand 
each other, it is imperative that they should agree to 
co-operate in a common cause, and that they should so act 
that the guiding principle of that common cause shall be 
even-handed and impartial justice. 

"We believe these fundamental things : First, that every 
people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which 
they shall live. Like other nations, we have ourselves 
no doubt once and again offended against that principle 
when for a little while controlled by selfish passion, as 
our franker historians have been honourable enough to 
admit; but it has become more and more our rule of life 
and action. Second, that the small states of the world 
have a right to enjoy the same respect for their sov- 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 103 

ereignty and for their territorial integrity that great and 
powerful nations expect and insist upon. And, third, 
that the world has a right to be free from every disturb- 
ance of its peace that has its origin in aggression and 
disregard of the rights of peoples and nations. 

"So sincerely do we believe in these things that I am 
sure that I speak the mind and wish of the people of 
America when I say that the United States is willing 
to become a partner in any feasible association of nations 
formed in order to realize these objects and make them 
secure against violation. 

"There is nothing that the United States wants for 
itself that any other nation has. We are willing, on 
the contrary, to limit ourselves along with them to a 
prescribed course of duty and respect for the rights of 
others which will check any selfish passion of our own, 
as it will check any aggressive impulses of theirs. ^ 

"If it should ever be our privilege to suggest or initiate 
a movement for peace among the nations now at war, 
I am sure that the people of the United States would wish 
their Government to move along these lines: 

"First, such a settlement with regard to their own 
immediate interests as the belligerents may agree upon. 
We have nothing material of any kind to ask for our- 
selves, and are quite aware that we are in no sense or 
degree parties to the present quarrel. Our interest is only 
in peace and its future guarantees. 

"Second, an universal association of the nations to 
maintain the inviolate security of the highway of the 
seas for the common and unhindered use of all the nations 
of the world, and to prevent any war begun either con- 
trary to treaty covenants or without warning and full sub- 
mission of the causes to the opinion of the world—a 
virtual guarantee of territorial integrity and political in- 
dependence." 



104 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

FROM Am ADDRESS OF MAY 30, 1916 

"And I also said that I believed that the people of the 
United States were ready to become partners in any alli- 
ance of the nations that would guarantee public right 
above selfish aggression. Some of the public prints have 
reminded me, as if I needed to be reminded, of what 
General Washington warned us against. He warned us 
against entangling alliances. I shall never myself con- 
sent to an entangling alliance, but I would gladly assent 
to a disentangling alliance — an alliance which would dis- 
entangle the peoples of the world from those combina- 
tions in which they seek their own separate and private 
interests and unite the people of the world to preserve 
the peace of the world upon a basis of common right and 
justice. There is liberty there, not limitation. There is 
freedom, not entanglement. There is the achievement 
of the highest things for which the United States has 
declared its principle." 

FROM AN ADDRESS OF OCTOBER 5, 1916 

"America up to the present time has been, as if by 
deliberate choice, confined and provincial, and it will be 
impossible for her to remain confined and provincial. 
Henceforth she belongs to the world and must act as part 
of the world, and all of the attitudes of America will 
henceforth be altered. ,, 

I ... • 

FROM AN ADDRESS OF OCTOBER 12, 1916 

"I have said, and shall say again, that when the great 
present war is over it will be the duty of America to 
join with the other nations of the world in some kind of 
league for the maintenance of peace. Now, America was 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 105 

not a party to this war, and the only terms upon which 
we will be admitted to a league, almost all the other 
powerful members of which were engaged in the war and 
made infinite sacrifices when we apparently made none, 
are the only terms which we desire, namely, that America 
shall not stand for national aggression, but shall stand for 
the just conceptions and bases of peace, for the compe- 
titions of merit alone, and for the generous rivalry of 
liberty." 



FROM AN ADDRESS OF OCTOBER 26, 1916 

"... What I intend to preach from this time on 
is that America must show that as a member of the 
family of nations she has the same attitude toward the 
other nations that she wishes her people to have toward 
each other: That America is going to take this position, 
that she will lend her moral influence, not only, but her 
physical force, if other nations will join her, to see to 
it that no nation and no group of nations tries to take 
advantage of another nation or group of nations, and 
that the only thing ever fought for is the common rights 
of humanity. 

"We must have a society of nations, not suddenly, 
not by insistence, not by any hostile emphasis upon the 
demand, but by the demonstration of the needs of the 
time. The nations of the world must get together and 
say, 'Nobody can hereafter be neutral as respects the 
disturbance of the world's peace for an object which the 
world's opinion cannot sanction.' The world's peace ought 
to be disturbed if the fundamental rights of humanity 
are invaded, but it ought not to be disturbed for any 
other thing that I can think of, and America was estab- 
lished in order to indicate, at any rate in one Government, 
the fundamental rights of man. America must hereafter 



106 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

be ready as a member of the family of nations to exert 
her whole force, moral and physical, to the assertion of 
those rights throughout the round globe." 

FROM AN ADDRESS OF JANUARY 22, 1917 

". . .In every discussion of the peace that must end 

this war, it is taken for granted that that peace must be 

followed by some definite concert of power which will 

make it virtually impossible that any such catastrophe 

shall ever overwhelm us again. Every lover of mankind, 

every sane and thoughtful man must take that for granted. 
****** 

"It is inconceivable that the people of the United States 
should play no part in that great enterprise. To take 
part in such a service will be the opportunity for which 
they have sought to prepare themselves by the very prin- 
ciples and purposes of their polity and the approved prac- 
tices of their Government ever since the days when they 
set up a new nation in the high and honourable hope 
that it might in all that it was and did show mankind the 
way to liberty. They cannot in honour withhold the 
service to which they are now about to be challenged. 
****** 

"That service is nothing less than this, to add their 
authority and their power to the authority and force of 
other nations to guarantee peace and justice throughout 
the world. 

****** 

"No covenant of co-operative peace that does not in- 
clude the peoples of the New World can suffice to keep the 
future safe against war; and yet there is only one sort 
of peace that the peoples of America could join in guar- 
anteeing. The elements of that peace much be elements 
that engage the confidence and satisfy the principles of 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 107 

the American Governments, elements consistent with their 
political faith and the practical convictions which the 
peoples of America have once for all embraced and under- 
taken to defend. 

****** 

"Mere agreements may not make peace. It will be 
absolutely necessary that a force be created as a guar- 
antor of the permanency of the settlement so much greater 
than the force of any nation now engaged or any alli- 
ance hitherto formed or projected that no nation, no 
probable combination of nations could face or with- 
stand it. 

"If the peace presently to be made is to endure it 
must be a peace made secure by the organized major force 

of mankind. 

****** 

"The equality of nations upon which peace must be 
founded if it is to last must be an equality of rights; 
the guarantees exchanged must neither recognize nor 
imply a difference between big nations and small, between 
those that are powerful and those that are weak. Right 
must be based upon the common strength, not upon the 
individual strength, of the nations upon whose concert 
peace will depend. Equality of territory or of resources 
there of course cannot be; nor any sort of equality not 
gained in the ordinary peaceful and legitimate develop- 
ment of the peoples themselves. But no one asks or 
expects anything more than an equality of rights. Man- 
kind is looking now for freedom of life, not for equi- 
poise of power. 

****** 

"I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid en- 
tangling alliances which would draw them into compe- 
titions of power, catch them in a net of intrigue and 
selfish rivalry, and disturb their own affairs with influ- 



108 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

ences intruded from without. There is no entangling alli- 
ance in a concert of power. When all unite to act in the 
same sense and with the same purpose, all act in the 
common interest and are free to live their own lives under 
a common protection. 

"I am proposing government by the consent of the gov- 
erned; that freedom of the seas which in international 
conference after conference representatives of the United 
States have urged with the eloquence of those who are the 
convinced disciples of liberty; and that moderation of 
armaments which makes of armies and navies a power 
for order merely, not an instrument of aggression or of 
selfish violence. 

"These are American principles, American policies. We 
could stand for no others. And they are also the prin- 
ciples and policies of forward looking men and women 
everywhere, and of every modern nation, of every en- 
lightened community. They are the principles of man- 
kind and must prevail." 

FROM AN ADDRESS OF APRIL 2, 1917 

"A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained 
except by a partnership of democratic nations. No auto- 
cratic government could be trusted to keep faith within 
it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honour, 
a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals 
away; the plottings of inner circles who could plan what 
they would and render an account to no one would be a 
corruption seated at its very heart. Only free peoples can 
hold their purpose and their honour steady to a common 
end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow 
interest of their own. 

****** 

"We shall fight for the things which we have always 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 109 

carried nearest our hearts — for democracy, for the right 
of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their 
own governments, for the rights and liberties of small 
nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a con- 
cert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to 
all nations and make the world itself at last free." 

FROM A COMMUNICATION TO RUSSIA, 
JUNE 9, 1917 

"We are fighting for the liberty, the self-government, 
and the undictated development of all peoples, and every 
feature of the settlement that concludes this war must 
be conceived and executed for that purpose. Wrongs 
must first be righted and then adequate safeguard must 
be created to prevent their being committed again. 
****** 

"And then the free peoples of the world must draw 
together in some common covenant, some genuine and 
practical co-operation that will in effect combine their 
force to secure peace and justice in the dealings of nations 
with one another. 

"The brotherhood of mankind must no longer be a fair 
but empty phrase; it must be given a structure of force 
and reality. The nations must realize their common life 
and effect a workable partnership to secure that life 
against the aggressions of autocratic and self-pleasing 
power." 

FROM AN ADDRESS OF DECEMBER 4, 1917 

"The worst that can happen to the detriment of the 
German people is this, that if they should still, after the 
war is over, continue to be obliged to live under am- 
bitious and intriguing masters interested to disturb the 



110 THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 

peace of the world, men or classes of men whom the other 
peoples of the world could not trust, it might be impos- 
sible to admit them to the partnership of nations which 
must henceforth guarantee the world's peace. That part- 
nership must be a partnership of peoples, not a mere part- 
nership of governments." 

FROM AN ADDRESS OF JANUARY 8, 1918 

"A general association of nations must be formed under 
specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual 
guarantees of political independence and territorial in- 
tegrity to great and small States alike." 

FROM AN ADDRESS OF FEBRUARY 11, 1918 

"This war had its roots in the disregard of the rights 
of small nations and of nationalities which lacked the 
union and the force to make good their claim to determine 
their own allegiances and their own forms of political 
life. Covenants must now be entered into which will 
render such things impossible for the future; and those 
covenants must be backed by the united force of all the 
nations that love justice and are willing to maintain it 
at any cost." 



APPENDIX V 

EXTRACT FROM ADDRESS OF LLOYD GEORGE 
BEFORE THE BRITISH TRADES UNIONS ON 
JANUARY 3, 1918 

"So long as the possibility of a dispute between nations 
continues — that is to say, so long as men and women are 
dominated by impassioned ambition and war is the only 
means of settling a dispute — all nations must live under 
a burden, not only of having from time to time to engage 
in it, but of being compelled to prepare for its possible 
outbreak. 

"The crushing weight of modern armaments, the in- 
creasing evil of compulsory military service, the vast 
waste of wealth and effort involved in warlike prepara- 
tion — these are blots on our civilization, of which every 
thinking individual must be ashamed. For these and 
other similar reasons we are confident that a great at- 
tempt must be made to establish by some international 
organization, an alternative to war as a means of settling 
international disputes. 

"After all, war is a relic of barbarism, and, just as law 
has succeeded violence as a means of settling disputes 
between individuals, so we believe that it is destined ulti- 
mately to take the place of war in the settlement of con- 
troversies between nations. 

"If, then, we are asked what we are fighting for, we 
reply, as we have often replied : We are fighting for a just 
and a lasting peace, and we believe that before permanent 

in 



112 THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 

peace can be hoped for three conditions must be fulfilled : 
First, the sanctity of treaties must be re-established; 
secondly, a territorial settlement must be secured, based 
on the right of self-determination or the consent of the 
governed, and lastly, we must seek, by the creation of 
some international organization, to limit the burden of 
armaments and diminish the probability of war. On these 
conditions its peoples are prepared to make even greater 
sacrifices than those they have yet endured." 



APPENDIX VI 

FROM THE PLATFORM ADOPTED BY THE 
BRITISH NATIONAL LABOUR CONFERENCE, 
LONDON, DECEMBER 2$, 1917 

"Whatever may have been the causes for which the 
war was begun, the fundamental purpose of the British 
labour movement in supporting the continuance of the 
struggle is that the world may henceforth be made safe 
for democracy. 

"Of all the war aims, none is so important to the peo- 
ples of the world as that there shall be henceforth on 
earth no more war. Whoever triumphs, the people will 
have lost unless some effective method of preventing war 
can be found. 

"As means to this end, the British labour movement 
relies very largely upon the complete democratization of 
all countries; on the frank abandonment of every form 
of imperialism; on the suppression of secret diplomacy, 
and on the placing of foreign policy, just as much as 
home policy, under the control of popularly elected legis- 
latures; on the absolute responsibility of the foreign min- 
ister of each country to its legislature; on such concerted 
action as may be possible for the universal abolition of 
compulsory military service in all countries, the common 
limitation of the costly armaments by which all peoples 
are burdened, and the entire abolition of profit-making 
armament firms, whose pecuniary interest lies always in 
war scares and rivalry in preparation for war. 

"But it demands, in addition, that it should be an essen- 

"3 



114 THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 

tial part of the treaty of peace itself that there should be 
forthwith established a super-national authority, or league 
of nations, which should not only be adhered to by all 
the present belligerents, but which every other independ- 
ent sovereign state in the world should be pressed to 
join; the immediate establishment of such league of 
nations not only of an international high court for the 
settlement of all disputes between states that are of 
justiciable nature, but also of appropriate machinery for 
prompt and effective mediation between states at issue 
that are not justiciable; the formation of an international 
legislature, in which the representatives of every civilized 
state would have their allotted share; the gradual de- 
velopment, as far as may prove to be possible, of inter- 
national legislation agreed to by and definitely binding 
upon the several states, and for a solemn agreement and 
pledge by all states that every issue between any two or 
more of them shall be submitted for settlement as afore- 
said, and that they will all make common cause against 
any state which fails to adhere to this agreement." 



APPENDIX VII 

PRESIDENT WILSON AND THE NEW INTER- 
NATIONAL MORALITY 

"Fellow-citizens, it is an unprecedented thing in the 
world that any nation in determining its foreign rela- 
tions should be unselfish, and my ambition is to see 
America set the great example; not only a great example 
morally, but a great example intellectually ... In the 
days to come men will no longer wonder how America 
is going to work out her destiny, for she will have pro- 
claimed to them that her destiny is not divided from the 
destiny of the world; that her purpose is justice and love 
of mankind'* 

"Come, let us renew our allegiance to America, con- 
serve her strength in its purity, make her chief among 
those who serve mankind, self-reverenced, self-com- 
manded, mistress of all forces of quiet counsel, strong 
above all others in good will and the might of invincible 
justice and right." 

"Tradition is a handsome thing in proportion as we live 
up to it. If we fall away from the tradition of the fathers, 
we have dishonoured them. If we forget the tradition 
of the fathers, we have changed our character; we have 
lost an old impulse; we have become unconscious of the 
principles in which the life of the nation itself is rooted 
and grounded. ... 'No other nation was ever born into 

H5 



116 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

the world with the purpose of serving the rest of the 
world just as much as it served itself." 

"We desire neither conquest nor advantage. We wish 
nothing that can be had only at the cost of another people. 
We have always professed unselfish purpose and we 
covet the opportunity to prove that our professions are 
sincere." 

"There have been other nations as rich as we; there 
have been other nations as powerful; there have been 
other nations as spirited; but I hope we shall never forget 
that we created this Nation, not to serve ourselves, but to 
serve mankind." 

"America is particularly free in this, that she has no 
hampering ambitions as a world power. We do not want 
a foot of anybody's territory. If we have been obliged 
by circumstances, or have considered ourselves to be 
obliged by circumstances, in the past, to take territory 
which we otherwise would not have thought of taking, 
I believe I am right in saying that we have considered 
it our duty to administer that territory, not for our- 
selves, but for the people living in it, and to put this 
burden upon our consciences — not to think that this thing 
is ours for our use, but to regard ourselves as trustees 
of the great business for those to whom it does really 
belong, trustees ready to hand it over to the cestui que 
trust at any time when the business seems to make that 
possible and feasible. That is what I mean by saying 
we have no hampering ambitions. We do not want any- 
thing that does not belong to us. Is not a nation in that 
position free to serve other nations, and is not a nation 
like that ready to form some part of the assessing opinion 
of the world?" 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 117 

"America has a great cause which is not confined to the 
American continent. It is the cause of humanity itself." 

"The one thing that the world cannot permanently resist 
is the moral force of great and triumphant convictions." 

"Our ambition, also, all the world has knowledge of. 
It is not only to be free and prosperous ourselves, but also 
to be the friend and thoughtful partisan of those who 
are free or who desire freedom the world over. If we 
have had aggressive purposes and covetous ambitions, they 
were the fruit of our thoughtless youth as a nation and 
we have put them aside. We shall, I confidently believe, 
never again take another foot of territory by conquest. 
We shall never in any circumstances seek to make an 
independent people subject to our dominion; because we 
believe, we passionately believe, in the right of every 
people to choose their own allegiance and be free masters 
altogether." 

"The mission of America in the world is essentially a 
mission of peace and good-will among men. She has 
become the home and asylum of men of all creeds and 
races. Within her hospitable borders they have found 
homes and congenial associations and freedom and a wide 
and cordial welcome, and they have become part of the 
bone and sinew and spirit of America itself. America 
has been made up out of the nations of the world and 
is the friend of the nations of the world." 

"... America will have forgotten her traditions 
whenever on any occasion she fights merely for herself 
under such circumstances as will show that she has for- 
gotten to fight for all mankind. And the only excuse 
that America can ever have for the assertion of her 



118 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

physical force is that she asserts it in behalf of the inter- 
est of humanity. 

"What a splendid thing it is to have so singular a 
tradition — a tradition of unselfishness ! When America 
ceases to be unselfish, she will cease to be America. When 
she forgets the traditions of devotion to human rights in 
general, which gave spirit and impulse to her founders, 
she will have lost her title deeds to her own nationality." 

"... We are part of the world, and nothing that con- 
cerns the whole world can be indifferent to us. We 
want always the force of America to fight for what? 
Not merely for the rights of property or of national 
ambition, but for the rights of mankind." 

"We wish to serve no selfish ends." 

"Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious asser- 
tion of the physical might of the nation, but only the 
vindication of right, of human right, of which we are 
only a single champion." 

"Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles 
of peace and justice in the life of the world as against 
selfish and autocratic power, and to set up amongst the 
really free and self-governed peoples of the world such 
a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth 
ensure the observance of those principles." 

"We have said in the beginning that we planted this 
great Government that men who wish freedom might 
have a place of refuge and a place where their hope could 
be realized, and now, having established such a Gov- 
ernment, having preserved such a Government, we are 
saying to all mankind: 'We did not set this Government 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 119 

up in order that we might have a selfish and separate 
liberty, for we are now ready to come to your assist- 
ance and fight upon the field of the world the cause of 
human liberty/ In this thing America attains her full 
dignity and the full fruition of her great purpose." 

"The position of America in this war is so clearly 
avowed that no man can be excused for mistaking it. 
She seeks no material profit or aggrandizement of any 
kind. She is fighting for no advantage or selfish object 
of her own, but for the liberation of peoples every- 
where from the aggressions of autocratic force " 

"We are fighting for the liberty, the self-government, 
and the undictated development of all peoples, and every 
feature of the settlement that concludes this war must 
be conceived and executed for that purpose." 

"The purposes of the United States in this war are 
known to the whole world— to every people to whom 
the truth has been permitted to come. They do not need 
to be stated again. We seek no material advantage of 
any kind." 

"My dream is that as the years go on and the world 
knows more and more of America it will also drink at 
these fountains of youth and renewal; that it also will 
turn to America for those moral inspirations which lie 
at the basis of all freedom; that the world will never 
fear America unless it feels that it is engaged in some 
enterprise which is inconsistent with the rights of 
humanity; and that America will come into the full light 
of the day when all shall know that she puts human 
rights above all other rights, and that her flag is the flag 
not only of America, but of humanity." 



120 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

"And now, by circumstances which she did not choose, 
over which she had no control, she has been thrust out 
into the great game of mankind, on the stage of the world 
itself, and here she must know what she is about, and 
no nation in the world must doubt that all her forces 
are gathered and organized in the interest of justice, 
righteousness, and humane government. 

"What I intend to preach from this time on is that 
America must show that as a member of the family of 
nations she has the same attitude toward the other nations 
that she wishes her people to have toward each other: 
That America is going to take this position, that she will 
lend her moral influence not only, but her physical force, 
if other nations will join her, to see to it that no nation 
and no group of nations tries to take advantage of 
another nation or group of nations, and that the only 
thing ever fought for is the common rights of humanity." 

"It is clear that nations must in the future be gov- 
erned by the same high code of honour that we demand 
of individuals." 

"We are at the beginning of an age in which it will 
be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of 
responsibility for wrong doing shall be observed among 
nations and their governments that are observed among 
the individual citizens of civilized states." 

"When I have made a promise as a man I try to keep 
it, and I know of no other rule permissible to a nation. 
The most distinguished nation of the world is the nation 
that can and will keep its promises, even to its own 
hurt." 

"I am proud to belong to a strong nation that says: 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 121 

This country, which we could crush, shall have just as 
much freedom in her own affairs as we have. If I am 
strong, I am ashamed to bully the weak. In proportion 
to my strength is my pride in withholding that strength 
from the oppression of another people." 

"A patriotic American is a man who is not niggardly 
and selfish in the things he enjoys that make for human 
liberty and the rights of man. He wants to share them 
with the whole world, and he is never so proud of the 
great flag under which he lives as when it comes to 
mean to other people as well as to himself a symbol of 
hope and liberty. I would be ashamed of this flag if 
it ever did anything outside America that we would not 
permit it to do inside America." 

"I am sometimes very much interested when I see 
gentlemen supposing that popularity is the way to suc- 
cess in America. The way to success in this great coun- 
try, with its fair judgments, is to show that you are not 
afraitl of anybody except God and His final verdict. If 
I did not believe that, I would not believe in democracy. 
If I did not believe that, I would not believe that people 
can govern themselves. If I did not believe that the 
moral judgment would be the last judgment, the final 
judgment, in the minds of men as well as at the tribunal 
of God, I could not believe in popular government. But 
I do believe these things, and therefore I earnestly believe 
in the democracy not only of America but of every awak- 
ened people that wishes and intends to govern and con- 
trol its own affairs." 

"But the right is more precious than peace, and we 
shall fight for the things which we have always carried 
nearest our hearts— for democracy, for the right of those 



122 PRESIDENT WILSON AND 

who submit to authority to have a voice in their own 
governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, 
for the universal dominion of right by such a concert 
of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all 
nations and make the world itself at last free." 

"My theme is of those great principles of compassion 
and of protection which mankind has sought to throw 
about human lives, the lives of non-combatants, the lives 
of men who are peacefully at work keeping the industrial 
processes of the world quick and vital, the lives of women 
and children and of those who supply the labour which 
ministers to their sustenance. We are speaking of no 
selfish material right but of rights which our hearts 
support and whose foundation is that righteous passion 
for justice upon which all law, all structures alike of 
family, of state, and of mankind must rest, and upon the 
ultimate base of our existence and our liberty. I cannot 
imagine any man with American principles at his heart 
hesitating to defend these things." 

"I want you to realize the part that the United States 
must play. It has been said, my fellow-citizens, been 
said with cruel emphasis in some quarters, that the people 
of the United States do not want to fight about anything. 
. . . But the people of the United States want to be 
sure what they are fighting about, and they want to be 
sure that they are fighting for the things that will bring 
to the world justice and peace. Define the elements; 
let us know what we are not fighting for the prevalence 
of this nation over that, for the ambitions of this group 
of nations as compared with the ambitions of that group 
of nations; let us once be convinced that we are called 
in to a great combination to fight for the rights of man- 
kind, and America will unite her force and spill her blood 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR i23 

for the great things which she has always believed in and 
followed." 

"Are we ready always to be the friends of justice, of 
fairness, of liberty, of peace, and of those accommoda- 
tions which rest upon justice and peace? In these two 
trying years that have just gone by we have forborne, 
we have not allowed provocation to disturb our judg- 
ments, we have seen to it that America kept her poise 
when all the rest of the world seemed to have lost its 
poise." 

"Only upon the terms of retaining that poise and using 
the splendid force which always comes with poise can we 
hope to play the beneficent part in the history of the 
world which I have just now intimated." 

"America does not want any additional territory. She 
does not want any selfish advantage over any other nation 
in the world, but she does wish every nation in the world 
to understand what she stands for and to respect what 
she stands for." 

"They are based, in short, upon the solid, eternal foun- 
dations of justice and humanity. No man can turn away 
from these things without turning away from the hope 
of the world. These are things, ladies and gentlemen, 
for which the world has hoped and waited with prayerful 
heart. God grant that it may be granted to America 
to lift this light on high for the illumination of the world." 

"No one who really comprehends the spirit of the great 
people for whom we are appointed to speak can fail to 
perceive that their passion is for peace, their genius best 
displayed in the practice of the arts of peace. Great 



124 THE MORAL AIMS OF THE WAR 

democracies are not belligerent. They do not seek or 
desire war. Their thought is of individual liberty and 
of the free labour that supports life and the uncensored 
thought that quickens it. Conquest and domination are 
not in our reckoning, nor agreeable to our principles. 
But just because we demand unmolested development and 
the undisturbed government of our own lives upon our 
own principles of right and liberty, we resent, from what- 
ever quarter it may come, the aggression we ourselves 
will not practise." 

"The interesting and inspiring thing about America, 
gentlemen, is that she asks nothing for herself except 
what she has a right to ask for humanity itself. We want 
no nation's property. We mean to question no nation's 
honour. We do not wish to stand selfishly in the way 
of the development of any nation. We want nothing 
that we cannot get by our own legitimate enterprise and 
by the inspiration of our own example; and, standing 
for these things, it is not pretension on our part to say 
that we are privileged to stand for what every nation 
would wish to stand for, and speak for those things which 
all humanity must desire." 

"My urgent advice to you would be, not only always 
to think first of America, but always, also, to think first 
of humanity. You do not love humanity if you seek to 
divide humanity into jealous camps. Humanity can be 
welded together only by love, by sympathy, by justice, 
not by jealousy and hatred." 



Printed in the United States of America 



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